most critics today would rather watch the bright lights of architecture and design than cast light into the shadows of the built environment.

And on ArchNewsNow, Norman Weinstein wondered,

More critically, what is the function of architecture criticism at this moment beyond opinion propping?

I wanted to respond more directly to this question of the role of architecture criticism and reporting—in part to provoke some others who throw words at buildings, who have promised to chime in as well.

I’d put the two most pressing questions this way: Is architecture criticism still architecture criticism?

Is it still – if it ever was – about merely architecture? Or do the forces that change the built environment come from a broader toolkit: from urban planning, certainly, but also from the more engineering-heavy realms of infrastructure, or more policy-heavy realms of politics?

And is it still criticism? What is today’s balance between the act of appraisal and the act of explanation? Sure, it’s always been about teaching, about explaining the Why, but the “two thumbs up” part of the equation seems less important now than the understanding and questioning that goes into that.

These stakes and possibilities became pointed for me on Inauguration Day, when in a tone-deaf editorial stroke, the New York Times published architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff’s review of Jean Nouvel’s Copenhagen Concert Hall. It was the biggest of days for public space in America, not only because of the millions gathered in Washington, but because of the millions of smaller gatherings across the country. But as if nailing himself in the coffin of the Bilbao decade, Ouroussoff wrote of

one of the most gorgeous buildings I have recently seen.

Architecture is more relevant than that. Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, saw that in DC, writing

not only about all the people filling Washington this week, but what they might symbolize or portend for Americans’ attitudes about cities and how we build them going forward.

The things that shape the built environment, and the things of which the built environment consist, are different now than they were ten years ago. With a financial crisis built upon too-cheap 2 x 4s, an environmental crisis owing partly to bad planning (and too much driving), and geopolitics as always driven by battles over borders and resources, space is power – now more than ever. How has the media’s role shifted in response? How might it?

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This is the first in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Andrew Blum is a contributing editor at Wired and Metropolis magazines, and a contributing editor at Urban Omnibus. He lives in Brooklyn.

I’d normally be tempted to dismiss this as the height of San Francisco foolishness (and it is), but at this moment I’m also in awe of the neighborhood’s guts—especially juxtaposed with New York Magazine’s “Freakoutonomics” package this week, about the impact of the economy on this city’s stores and restaurants. The next few years, if not mere months, are no doubt going to remake New York’s retail landscape. But if this cycle is going to be one of “creative destruction,” then it’s potentially an opportunity to get a do-over with what Adam Greenfield calls the “repeating module of doom”– the Duane Reade/bank/DunkinDonuts rhythm that’s taken over the streetscape, making it a less interesting, less dynamic place.

I don’t mean merely to suggest that we should fight American Apparel. (I live across the street from one. It’s always empty.) But I do have a heightened appreciation for the brazenness of that patch of American city’s belief in its ability to influence its environment. I’ve always thought that part of being a New Yorker was a reverence for the physical manifestation of economic forces. But right now those forces are feeble. New game in the city.

Andrew Blum is a contributing editor at Wired and Metropolis magazines, and a contributing editor at Urban Omnibus. He lives in Brooklyn.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

In Praise of Slowness:
Thoughts on Writing About the Future of the City

“To bring New York down to date, a man would have to be published with the speed of light – and not even Harper is that quick.” – E. B. White

In 2005, the corner of Plaza Street and Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn was a weedy parking lot for Union Temple, the oldest congregation in the borough. As of this writing, in the first days of 2009, there’s a smooth gray sidewalk, a few freshly planted saplings, and a 15-story, 102-unit glass condominium building, designed by the architect Richard Meier, being busily punch-listed for its first occupants.

Does that change – this particular building and rebuilding of the city – seem fast or slow? It’s a question I find myself asking twice most mornings: first, while walking by that construction site on my way to Prospect Park, and then again an hour or so later, sitting down at my computer to write, as a journalist, about buildings and the city. What strikes me is how different the question seems in each context – how sharp the disconnect is between the immediacy required of journalism and the sheer evolutionary slowness of the city itself.

This is not a new concern of architecture journalists, but it is one more often put in spatial rather than temporal terms. Do we write about figure or ground, the building itself or the building in context? Maybe it’s the prospect of a few years of stillness, but I’ve recently been thinking more about time. And what’s obvious is that the city is slow, and we write too fast.

Hollywood marketers talk about “eventizing” a movie, and architecture marketers have caught on to the strategy as well. For the most visible public buildings – museums, schools, performing arts centers – the publicists typically call in the design press corps before the construction workers have even left, then allocate the release of photographs according to each publication’s status and audience. It’s a race against the punch-list, with the result being that new buildings are treated more as commodities to be consumed, rather than long-living parts of the fabric of the city. Architecture is covered as event rather than as ongoing presence. I can’t begrudge the institutions’ motives: good press makes good donors, and everyone needs those. Nor can I feign my own indifference to these shiny new things (that Meier building included). Often they’re spectacular, occasionally they’re profound, and they make for tidy stories. But the baubles soak up too much of the attention of us writers, especially now when we are constrained by shrinking page counts and an increasingly global audience. The slow city hardly stands a chance.

If this were a tolerable, even pleasurable diversion for a while, it seems less relevant now. Climate change has raised the stakes, at the same time that it has changed the subject. The design of buildings and the building of cities is taking on extraordinary significance in a world whose geopolitics is increasingly defined by a dominantly urban population and an imperiled environment, and it means something different than it did before. It can no longer be primarily understood aesthetically, socially or economically (complex though those perspectives are), but requires technical and scientific considerations as well. If the ecology and engineering of cities used to be happily opaque – irrelevant compared to how the city looked and how it was used – today the energy use of buildings and transit systems, the flows of water and goods, even the electronic networks that support the city, are all crucial to the broader life of the city. For architecture journalists, this means a shift towards topics that in the past may have been more likely to be covered by science and technology writers. The meaning of buildings, and the built city, has changed.

New buildings are treated more as commodities to be consumed, rather than long-living parts of the fabric of the city.So has the pace of the story. The emerging storyline of the 21st century city is its relationship to climate change. Yet that emergence is slow and hidden. The New York Times science writer Andrew Revkin calls them “slow drip” stories. “Global science is all someday somewhere,” he frets. “Newspapers are about today. These issues are the antithesis of the stuff we’ve been calling news for the last 150 years.”

That’s the crux of my internal dialogue as I walk across Grand Army Plaza. As a singular object the Meier building is shiny, new and pretty – but who does it matter to, how and when? It seems to spit out one-liners, which everyone hears differently: the pleasures of luxury and the evils of gentrification; the technological pride of modernism or its gross acontextualism; the environmental advantages of density or an infrastructure that’s becoming overwhelmed. All these readings are valid, all these readings are changing. How do I do justice to them in the story of the city moving forward?

Environmental writing could be a model. Deeply linked to a tradition of activism, based nearly always on direct observation, it has never struggled to summon a sense of lasting immediacy out of the present conditions of the physical world – however slowly they may change. But the trouble is that it often gets its backbone from a romantic ideal about nature, as a quasi-spiritual absolute that frames the discussion. In his new Library of America collection “American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau,” Bill McKibben describes an overarching interest in this “collision between people and the rest of the world.” The difference, and the hard part, is accounting for the city’s incontrovertibly human nature. I like the fact that for Revkin, “the story,” as he puts it, isn’t “the environment” or “climate change,” but the “efforts to balance human affairs with the planet’s limits” – two things the city exemplifies.

As construction on the Meier building has wound down, and the daily additions have become finer grained – a new curb-cut or door frame, rather than a whole floor or a wall of windows – I’ve been tempted to think of it in terms of an urban version of the ecological succession that turns a field into forest. By that logic, the site’s transformation is nearly complete and the climax state is coming soon, in the form of a cluster of kids waiting for the school bus and a Town Car idling at the curb. But it would be a false climax. Ecologists don’t view nature as something static, and neither is the city. The building is finished. Some people are moving in while others in the neighborhood might soon be pushed out. Classrooms may be overcrowded. New suburban sprawl might be avoided. But none of those stories can be rushed. The meaning of the building in the city has just begun. Its story is still in the future.

Andrew Blum is a contributing editor at Wired and Metropolis magazines, and a contributing editor at Urban Omnibus. He lives in Brooklyn.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Image © Tom Giebel (atomische.com)