The [Chicago] Tribune, which had been reducing staff and budgets for years before Alden Global Capital accelerated the process with its May 2021 purchase of Tribune Publishing, did not replace Kamin, just as it did not replace several other culture writers who left the paper. So the retired critic took matters into his own hands. — Northwestern University

With its focus on mobility, greenery and renovation, the overarching legacy of the Paris Olympics looks set to be more promising than most, ultimately helping to stitch long-severed suburbs into the centre. The mental geography of most Parisians will expand, for the better. Perhaps that’s the most that could be hoped for: with its emphasis on speed and reliance on private developers, the Olympics can hardly be a vehicle for more equitable forms of development. — The Guardian

Over the past decade or so, bleacher stairs have become a ubiquitous marker of contemporary public architecture. It’s time for the trend to stop.

Its subsequent proliferation serves as a good example of how avant-garde design, or at least a consumerist version of it, filters down to the mainstream.

The broader point is that architects need to be more inventive as they plan new public spaces, and their patrons need to demand that those spaces are accessible for the entire population. — The Dallas Morning News

A lightweight university study centre designed to be easily disassembled has won the prize for the best building in Europe. Longevity, permanence and a sense of immutability might be the ambition of most architects, but Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke would be delighted to see their building adapted and reconfigured, or ultimately dismantled and moved somewhere else altogether. — Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian

What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, “Learning from Las Vegas” argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be—and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture. — The New Yorker

Nowhere is the gulf between digital promise and physical fact more spectacularly evident than at the new Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in California [...]

Almost a generation in the making, it feels like the final death rattle of a bygone age, the last gasp of an era preoccupied with novel form for form’s sake. Perhaps it is fitting that this flimsy, paper-thin architecture is held together with tape. — The Guardian

Texture is the condition of possibility through which our bodies meet environments; like gender in its relationality, texture is palpable only in becoming. So did the blue carpet in my childhood bedroom enmesh gender between my toes? And if we alter texture — including how we talk about it — might we transform gender in both minute and brash ways? — Places Journal

Welcome to “Countryside, the Future”: This is what you might get if you asked a celebrated European philosopher-architect to reinvent the Iowa State Fair. No mess, no smells, just acres of color printouts, cryptic homilies about nature, and a couple of pesticide-spraying drones. Did you know that agriculture is increasingly computerized? — New York Magazine

[Amager Bakke] is a work that revels in its own contrivance, a condensation and celebration of the surrounding artifice, a creation of what might be called hypernature. It is at once an energy facility, converting refuse into electricity, and a ski slope. It is arresting and striking. It’s an emblem of a culture of why-not and because-you-can that currently pops up in a number of modern cities [...] — The Guardian

The idea of the “both-and” suggested a new pluralism, and maybe a new tolerance, in architecture. But the phrase turned out to have its limits. To the extent that Venturi was making an argument in favor of a kind of big-tent populism in architecture, it was a space for new styles instead of new voices, new forms rather than new people. In fact, tucked inside Complexity and Contradiction is an argument for a renewed insularity in the profession [...]. — The Atlantic

“From Bauhaus to Our House,” Mr. Wolfe attacked modern architecture and what he saw as its determination to put dogma before buildings. Published in 1981, it met with the same derisive response from critics. “The problem, I think,” Paul Goldberger wrote in The Times Book Review, “is that Tom Wolfe has no eye.” — The New York Times

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has defended proposals for a high-rise, mixed-use scheme in London – described as a ‘breakthrough project’ for the practice – following criticism over its size and location. Shortly before Christmas, the firm submitted plans to Lambeth Council [...] The scheme, the practice’s first major mixed-use residential and commercial development in the UK, has been dubbed a ‘two-fingered salute’ by opponents, who claim the proposals are too big for the site. — architectsjournal.co.uk

The slabs in front of me seemed at once the most and least architectural objects I’d ever seen. They were banal and startling, full and empty of meaning. Here were the techniques of Land Art, medieval construction, marketing and promotion, architectural exhibition and the new nativism rolled uncomfortably if somehow inevitably into one. — Los Angeles Times