Every building, indeed every project of urban or landscape design, is a response to a multitude of questions, some intrinsic to the specifics of site, program and economics, others more general to the profession’s internal discourse and still others to the culture at large. It is the first job of the critic to list and…

Landscape/architectural criticism today is often conservative and superficial. I attribute this to two main causes; the modern insecurity of the professions, and the mystification of the academic aspect of landscape/architecture and their concomitant critics and apologists.

The first issue, the insecurity of the landscape/architecture professions, is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the fallout…

How should architecture criticism change? I say: more profiles, not fewer. When we write about architecture, yes, we should write about it in context. Big, city-shaping forces are at work here, but those can be cumbersome ideas, and trying to talk about them pushes us into metaphor territory or worse, theory.

What’s wrong with…

One night recently I took my three-year-old daughter to Cypress Hills, Brooklyn for a Dept. of Ed. hearing in a stifling basement with autopsy-grade lighting, and it got me thinking about how we urban-design writers work.

The nonprofit where my wife works had a stake in the hearing, and I’d wanted our daughter to…

To respond to Andrew’s question — What is the state of architecture criticism? — we first need to look at where we are in terms of architecture. I agree, the “Bilbao Ponzi era” is over. Starchitecture has, like some hurtling supernova, burned itself out. What remains? An era of infrastructure, of “fix it first,”…

In the couple months since my essay, In Praise of Slowness, was posted here on Omnibus, the meta-question of criticism has repeatedly floated to the surface. It’s been urged on by global upheaval—the end of the Bilbao Ponzi era!—but more modestly by the publication of On Architecture, a collection of…