Today’s piece was going to be an op-ed column in the New York Times.
But they declined to publish what I supplied. Which was this... - Banksy — Better Out than In

Cornell University’s new architecture building designed by Rem Koolhaas’ Office of Metropolitan Architecture is a “disaster” says Cornell University architecture professor Jonathan Oschorn. “The code violations are egregious”, states Ochshorn. — businessofarchitecture.com

Far from being anchored in the local context, the project (the disastrous City of Culture of Galicia outside Santiago de Compostela, designed by Peter Eisenman) has decapitated Monte de Gaias and replaced it with a phony landscape with curves like those of a fun-fair roller coaster. These cynical intellectual manipulations cannot mask the reality of structures resembling supermarkets twisted about with algorithms and camouflaged with a thin veneer of granite (imported from Brasil!). — Uncube

Now that the exhibition has opened at the museum's Geffen Contemporary branch in Little Tokyo, where it will limp along through the middle of September as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents series, it's clear that it is the product of an architectural ruling class in Los Angeles that is not so much dysfunctional as increasingly insular. — Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times

It might seem like a mismatch: the Dolans, veterans of many public brawls, against Kimmelman, an urbane trained pianist who previously wrote primarily about art. But such is the power of the Times when it’s given to a crusading voice. — NY Magazine

Renderings by Tappan Zee Constructors LLC, the team selected to design and build the bridge at a cost of $4 billion, show a structure crowned by 400-foot-high towers that look like insect antennae waving aimlessly in the wind.

Four pairs of masts tilt outward, from which cables splay to support the road deck. The towers are intended to form an iconic image, but they are just stumpy.

This is a site that deserves the magnificence of the Golden Gate Bridge. — bloomberg.com

Henry Hope Reed, an architecture critic and historian whose ardent opposition to modernism was purveyed in books, walking tours of New York City and a host of curmudgeonly barbs directed at advocates of the austere, the functional and unornamented in public buildings and spaces, died Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97. — nytimes.com

The shrinkage of daily newspapers and news and culture magazines has thinned the already slim ranks of architecture critics. While blogs and social media proliferate debate about architecture and design, many have fretted about the lack of a common dialogue around architecture and urbanism as defined by the work of leading critics. It turns out that architecture criticism is far from dead, however, as three established voices are finding new outlets with newspapers and national magazines. — archpaper.com

Analysis, rather than the promotion of starchitects, was her aim, and a prodigious amount of research underlies her early, punchy pronouncements as well as her late, magisterial style...Her death removes a passionate and particular voice from the shrinking ranks of full-time architecture critics, but also represents a loss of institutional memory for architecture culture...She didn’t offer compromise positions — The Nation

Kennicott’s entry included several pieces published in the Style section last year. One was a review in June of an exhibit of creations by the architect Kevin Roche at the National Building Museum. — washingtonpost.com

It is a thoroughly cynical piece of work, a building that uses a frenzy of architectural forms to endorse the idea that architecture, in the end, is mere decoration. Mayne's design appears to put innovative architecture on a literal pedestal — or a plinth, to be exact — while actually allowing it to become peripheral, noticeably separate from the heart of the museum and its galleries. — latimes.com

Whatever you want, then, go to an architect for it; not to a carpenter, or a mason, or your own still more profound incompetence. Tell him all your practical, material desires, and insist that they shall be respected... Settle your practical desires and state them clearly; and, if you will, pour out your vague aesthetic wishes; try to explain those crude artistic preferences, those misty, formless visions which you are pleased to call “my own ideas.” — Places Journal