Much has already been said about how everyone is an architecture critic these days, how the Internet has sped up the criticism cycle, and how the ubiquity of imagery has made architecture magazines that much less valuable. But Alexandra Lange noted another problem with Internet criticism: Nowadays most architecture “criticism” is really just commentary on renderings. Rare is a critic’s response to experiencing an actual building. In fact, a building’s merits are so thoroughly debated while in rendering form that writing about the built work can seem almost besides the point. As a result, the experiential quality of buildings has become less of a focus for design criticism — a potentially dangerous problem for architecture.

We’re a little too nostalgic for a kind of magazine culture that may not have been as robust as assumed.Indeed, very little of the evening’s conversation even touched on buildings themselves. While the Internet has enabled commentary on projects far from our backyards, it has encouraged a kind of watered-down criticism that lacks real reporting. Mimi Zeiger defended the Internet’s merits by giving a great example of how the Internet’s speed and conversational tone can enable a fast debate about the value of a building. Recently the LA Times critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote a short blog post about a Michael Maltzan building (yes, still in renderings!) at San Francisco State University. The building, which will cost $265 million, was then criticized by blogger Javier Arbona on the grounds of its financing — though it is paid for by a public university, which is getting less and less money from the bankrupt state of California, the money will come through a complex financial arrangement with Wall Street. Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), then chimed in about the corporatization of universities. Zeiger used this example of fast-paced dialogue to show how lively the Internet criticism sphere is — it drew in a “traditional” critic, a non-traditional blogger, and an architect, plus all the archi-Internet nerds through comments and Twitter. This debate has the additional effect of shaping future reviews of this building and other public-financed projects.

But as the editor of a print publication and the person responsible for the overhaul of Domus’ online presence, Grima voiced a fair amount of nostalgia for the heyday of print architecture magazines in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, magazines like Domus or Casabella would publish all important buildings, and yet criticize many of them. Today’s architecture criticism is stifled by the fact that most magazines do not publish stories about buildings the editors don’t like — or can’t criticize. Zeiger noted it’s too expensive to print a story on a building an editor hates.

I’d argue that there’s something else at play here. Perhaps part of the reason we are nostalgic for the mid-20th-century coverage in print magazines is that the United States was then the center of the skyscraper and urban planning boom. Now the industry has moved to Asia. But where is the commentary on Zaha’s opera house in Guangzhou or Moshe Safdie’s Marina Bay? Architectural Record will still cover it, but three months later. And certainly not with the same kind of first-person knowledge and passion that Maltzan’s SFSU building inspired. Isn’t it problematic that this blogger community is not able to respond to the work going up in Asia and the Middle East with the same kind of authority and visceral response as they might to one in California?

Eva Franch noted that this lack of “criticality” isn’t confined to print magazines. Rather than criticism, she sees the Internet encouraging more exposure of architecture and commentary on it. She noted that blogs are “reporting an obsession, not taking a position.” It’s a comment that gets right to the heart of my last On Criticism piece. A lack of editorial vision or critical position is the final element that many blogs are missing — the thing that keeps us pining for print.

Shannon Mattern helped to conclude the evening with a reminder: the unsettling aspects of Internet “microculture” pervade all art forms and are not particular to architecture criticism. We assume that most architecture blogs, which pursue niche interests without establishing broader socio-political values, fail to inspire a broader debate about architecture. But I’m beginning to think we’re a little too critical of the dialogue happening online, and a little too nostalgic for a kind of magazine culture that may not have been as robust as assumed.

In the drafty Storefront space, without adequate seating and headache-inducing microphone problems, I felt an honest desire to be back at home, in a comfortable chair, with my laptop and Twitter feed. I never thought I’d become the kind of person who occasionally prefers virtual communication to the real kind. But increasingly I think we are living in a golden age of online conversation, one that has more in common with “happenings” than the print journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Happenings had a great influence on the development of conceptual art; could the same be said one day about blogging and architecture?

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

Diana Lind is a 2011 fellow at Van Alen Institute where she helped develop the ideas competition Life at the Speed of Rail. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design. Connect on Twitter @dianalindindex.

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.

The article takes issue with the kind of criticism that is found on popular architecture blogs. We know this brand of lament well: the web is killing everything that was ever good, and, in this case, Kelly is wringing his hands that “speculative” bloggers who focus more on cultural mashups than straightforward dissections of architectural projects — in the style of, say, Paul Goldberger — have failed to produce what he blandly calls “informed, intelligent criticism.” And because the blogosphere is the new establishment, this means that we can expect that this kind of writing and the figures behind it are here to stay.

Although Kelly takes aim at a few British bloggers (Bad British Architecture, Strange Harvest, etc.), I was most interested in his attack on BLDGBLOG, which he calls “probably the most influential architecture blog in the world.” Its author is Geoff Manaugh, whom Kelly calls an “institution.” Manaugh’s response to Kelly makes two key points: first, Manaugh has never attempted to replace traditional architecture criticism, nor does he hope to cultivate an audience that is looking for that kind of stuff; and second, he would welcome an alternative to his own style of blogging that might resemble the smart, level-headed approaches of the LA Times‘ architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne or The Center for Land Use Interpretation‘s founder Matthew Coolidge. He then ends by saying:

Imagine a world, then, where critics like Peter Kelly actually step up and demonstrate how to do the things they so enjoy pointing out as lacking in others. If they could succeed at this — and find an audience, and push an agenda, and gather influence, and raise the stakes of what it means to be an architecture blogger — then we would all, as writers and readers and builders, be stronger because of it.

To my mind, the reason why there isn’t more of Peter Kelly’s kind of writing is that there aren’t enough places where one can make a living writing about architecture. There are probably fewer than a dozen people who make a living in the United States writing about architecture (and don’t get the majority of their incomes through editing, teaching or consulting). The problem, in other words, isn’t that Geoff Manaugh is a popular blogger, but that the vision of Peter Kelly’s ideal critic isn’t economically feasible these days. Until a new business model, or a better way of funding criticism through a smaller niche of avid readers, is figured out we can expect to see the number of pages (even webpages) dedicated to serious criticism dwindle: even the monthly critiques by Robert Campbell and Michael Sorkin had to be cut from Architectural Record‘s coverage in 2010.)

This economic impossibility needs to be recognized before proposing a utopian world where architecture critics have all the necessary resources to provide the informed, intelligent criticism expected of them. Otherwise it’s like saying our urban education system should rival that of private schools without recognizing that there aren’t unlimited funds to support that revolution.

A sense of responsibility for guiding public discussion about architecture is what I miss most.

So what is the appropriate response to this situation that we all find a bit disappointing? Is it to voice frustration with the new guard that is innovating? No. Instead, we should be asking: Why does the Old Establishment, which is adequately supported, suck so much? Why is Nicolai Ouroussoff still the lead critic for the Times when his writing, at its best, is greeted with a shrug? And while we all love Paul Goldberger, why hasn’t The New Yorker given someone else a chance to write the occasional piece of criticism for the magazine? If we’re going to be using new means to create a dialogue about architecture criticism, it might be interesting to do it in a way that is purposefully attempting to overthrow the PMS (pale, male, stale) guard.

Kelly presumes that BLDGBLOG is incredibly influential, and it is, in so far as it has widened the context and lens through which we see architecture. But it doesn’t shape the architecture profession (that’s not what it sets out to do) and it doesn’t serve as much of a reference about what’s happened in architecture over the past few years. Like most blogs, it’s really more of a catalog of Manaugh’s personal interests.

If the old architecture criticism establishment continues to be boring and a new establishment continues to mine the esoteric margins of architectural thought rather than the work of architects, what is at risk is a clear sense of who is debating the direction of architecture as practice or discipline. Kelly blames Manaugh et al. for lacking the right style or substance; Manaugh seems to shirk responsibility for the future of online dialogue about architecture.

Perhaps magazines like Architectural Record feel too much of a responsibility for charting what’s happening in highbrow, mainstream architecture and don’t allow for enough personal, tangential conversation. But that sense of authority and responsibility for guiding public understanding and discussion about architecture is what I miss most about the old establishment. I miss that much more than the writing style in which old media expressed itself or even the architecture that old media referenced. When Herbert Muschamp was the critic for the Times, he felt a responsibility to curate a series of alternatives to the SOM-designed replacement for the World Trade Center — is there anyone writing right now who would take on that role of architectural shaman?

What should someone with the privilege of being listened to do then? Manaugh’s call for a more vibrant criticism scene, which enriches the thinking of writers and architects, is just one example of how he can wield his power to greater effect. We all seem to agree that we need more online voices that are actively challenging architecture and architecture criticism as they are practiced. To use a Manaugh-style analogy: he’s shown us the playing field and now he’s kicking around a soccer ball waiting for a game of pick-up. Anyone else inspired to answer this call to action? At the very least, I think this debate has revived the On Criticism series on this website, so game on!

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This is the seventh 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.

Diana Lind is a 2011 fellow at Van Alen Institute where she helped develop the ideas competition Life at the Speed of Rail. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design. Connect on Twitter @dianalindindex.

The value of conceiving criticism in this way, it seems to me, is that it allows for and acknowledges that certain buildings and projects may be perfectly elegant or beautiful solutions to perfectly trivial questions (think Meier’s tower on Grand Army Plaza) and, conversely, that there may be difficult or unsuccessful designs which nevertheless engage questions that have much greater relevance or significance to the values the critic prizes. Because criticism is perforce a statement of values; it is in that sense that criticism is at root a utopian venture and a bully pulpit. If we weren’t interested in remaking the world it wouldn’t matter much what we said about it.

In this vein, it is also important, from time to time, to write about bad buildings and failed projects, to use them as counter-exemplars and to explicate what it is in their design and realization that makes them a negative standard. This is difficult for a profession bred on the false politesse of ‘if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything’. We need to understand what makes bad buildings bad, and what the steady accretion of poorly conceived, boring, venal and badly built projects does to our cities and our souls. We need to name names. Or else, give up altogether.

There is also an element of time in all this; Henry A. Millon, one of the best critical historians of his generation, used to say that history could not be written before 50 years had passed, the implication being that the circumstances which frame a project’s gestation could not themselves be looked at historically until a certain contemporaneous reverberation had dissipated. The prerequisite of history is distance and a consequent lack of immediate familiarity; context must become strange again, or more precisely, we must become estranged from it, for the methods of historical analysis to be deployed. By this standard we are only just able to begin to analyze the projects of the 1960’s, to look seriously at Saarinen’s TWA terminal for example. And, in fact, this is exactly what is happening, the Museum of the City of New York’s revisionist Saarinen exhibition and the current reappraisals of Rudolph and Stone following by a few years the welter of texts and exhibitions that had us look afresh at the icons of the previous decade, Lever House and the Seagram Building, etc. (to look only within the limits of Manhattan for examples).

Criticism of course is but the first draft of history, not the thing itself. It is journalistic in the original Latin/Francophone sense of the word — ‘of today.’ Its historical aspirations, such as they are, can only be to serve as the raw material of some future, more dispassionate, analysis. But in exchange criticism can — must — make full claim to passion, to the convictions, enthusiasms and biases that animate discussion today, now, in full understanding that once our passions are spent they too will become the subject of more broadly contextual and quieter historical methods. Deprived of any pretense to history, criticism has nothing left but bias: without bias criticism is worthless.

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This is the sixth 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.

Stephen Rustow is the founding principal of SRA/Museoplan, a consulting practice working with arts institutions and design professionals on the presentation of cultural collections.  An architect and urban planner, he is also a Professor of Architecture at Cooper Union and has written criticism for Praxis, JSAH and other publications. He lives in Manhattan.

The first issue, the insecurity of the landscape/architecture professions, is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the fallout from Modernism. In his seminal essay “Whatever happened to Urbanism?” Koolhaas gave voice to an unsettling feeling that had been haunting practitioners since it became apparent that modernist architecture was not the panacea it claimed and not as important as it supposed. Forced to confront superfluity in a single generation, the critical discourse within the profession took up defensive positions to weather the storm.

The second issue is more ingrained; the mystification and resultant inaccessibility of the intellectual aspect of the landscape/architecture professions. Design pedagogy is defined according to processes of exclusivity: design methods and forms are understood as too sophisticated to be either fully comprehended, funded, or implemented by its constituents. And academic discourse is presented as too complex and profound to be undertaken or appreciated by the plebeians. For this reason, the majority of practitioners have abdicated their responsibility to contribute to the contemporary discourse within the professions. It is currently dominated by writers and theoreticians with no foundation in praxis.

As a result, the critical discourse has become a series of self-catalyzing memes and hyperbolic metaphors characterized by a forced focus on concept and cult of personality. Only projects deemed exemplary according to a conservative set of values (standards of beauty, economic viability, social popularity) are discussed and then largely in a laudatory tone. This is not healthy criticism.

The landscape does not need an apologist. The implicit meanings do not need to be spelled out and given voice, and we do not need to know if the design decisions meet the approval criteria of the author. In recent decades, a generation of design practitioners and writers have taken to conceptualizing a site, wrapping it up tightly in a metaphor (or series of them), and then narrating the argument to us. Marc Treib argues the impotence of this stance was argued persuasively in an essay titled “Must Landscapes Mean?”*

Meaning accrues over time; like respect, it is earned, not granted. While the designer yearns to establish a landscape that will acquire significance, it is not possible to use pat symbols alone as a means to transmute syntax into semantics, that is, tectonics into meanings… differences in culture, in education, in life experience, in our experience of nature will all modify our perception of the work of landscape architecture… We cannot make that place mean, but we can, I hope, instigate reactions to the place that fall within the desired confines of happiness, gloom, joy, contemplation, or delight.

After addressing these two issues, the question becomes what should contemporary criticism focus on? If the purpose of professional criticism is not to explain a project but to make the work better, then there are four areas of focus of contemporary criticism: political process, cultural context, a focus on criticism through time, and polemics.

First, the political process; instead of remaining enamored with the cult of personality, the designer’s thoughts and views should always be presented within the larger context of all of the players in a project. Without exception the significant designers of our time are experts at negotiating the political intrigues inherent in public agencies, affluent clients, vocal constituents, and marginalized communities. This dynamic will always influence a project and the criticism should acknowledge and examine this.

Second, the cultural context – historical, scientific, technological, social and popular – should be present in criticism. This can be implied or explicit but it should be present. It is this perspective that will help to frame the discussion around sustainability, changing it from a tactic that is essentially a marketing tool for designers, developers, politicians, and manufacturers, to a logical argument and thoughtful discussion. If the intellectual context surrounding the implementation of an initiative were more thorough and critical the project could be examined more honestly for effectiveness and appropriateness.

Third, criticism for a project should take place through time. How a place changes over the course of a day, through the seasons, and across a number of years should be considered. The conventional approach is largely the fault of shortsighted editors placing a focus on narrow definitions of timely and relevant in order to drum up readership for their publication. Criticism of a project should absolutely not be limited to opening day, a date set by political and economic agendas. Andrew Blum stated this sentiment in his essay “In Praise of Slowness” and Elizabeth Meyer’s essay “Slow Landscapes”* is a good example of a more thoughtful type of criticism.

Fourth, all landscape/architecture criticism should be polemical. The High Line is an exceptional project — extremely expensive, complicated, and high profile. That it has gotten a free pass from the critics, Jacky Bowring’s critique notwithstanding, is a huge disservice to the professional community. Every project, at various stages and according to metrics deemed appropriate by different editors, should be examined and questioned. As a profession, we gain nothing by constantly patting the same people (and by extension, ourselves) on the back for a job well done. Designers know that no project is perfect. Self-righteous celebration is not the job of criticism within the profession. There is a place for that, and it is with the lobbyists, apologists and at times the popular media.

Ultimately, criticism exists to make the work better, always better. If the discourse can include more voices — practitioners, writers, and academics — all questioning and examining thoughtfully and professionally, we can get at the interesting aspects, stories, intrigues, and facts. If we can get past our fixation on metaphor, concept and style, landscape/architectural criticism will function as a feedback loop with the design process to better the work of designing the built environment.

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

* “Must Landscapes Mean?” by Marc Treib Landscape Journal. 14(1):46-62 (1995)

** “Slow Landscapes: A New Erotics of Sustainability,” by Elizabeth K. Meyer, Harvard Design Magazine, Vol. 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10, p. 22-31.

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.

FASLANYC works as a landscape architect for an urban design firm in New York City. He also writes the landscape criticism blog faslanyc and contributes to other design journals with features focusing on urban projects in South America.

What’s wrong with writing about people? What better way to bring criticism – and architecture – down to earth than by talking about the hands that make it? The starchitect era gave us characters worth writing about. The starchitect may be dead, but he taught us – critics and everyone else – that architecture is more than buildings. It’s egos, politics, history, cities, scandal, money, and it all revolves around people. How’s that for context?

Muschamp compared buildings to Hitchcock blondes. So what? At his talk at SVA last week, Chandler Burr compared perfumes to herb-scented breezes over Turkish seawater. But the people behind the perfumes were more interesting. French guys who guess the molecular content of the fragrance on an Air France moist towelette, the scientists who know the difference between C12 and C11 (the even ones smell citrussy, the odd ones smoky; or something like that), whose work gets hawked by naked models on three-story billboards. But Chandler didn’t talk about them, just name-dropped. Turkish seawater? Who cares? People over metaphor.

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This is the fourth 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.

William Bostwick is a freelance writer, podcaster, and editor. He lives in Brooklyn.

The nonprofit where my wife works had a stake in the hearing, and I’d wanted our daughter to sense the excitement of city politics, so I brought her out on the elevated J train. When she got restless, she asked: “Why am I here?” I told her she should clap along with the chanting, which she cheerfully did. Parents and politicians came to this dreary room, as they reliably do, to state their case and then hunt for an equitable resolution. I hope one day she feels how profoundly such meetings matter. But what will she understand about my work?

You’d expect those of us who “see” urban design to highlight projects that foster dialogue and blunt climatic calamity. Yet too often we acclaim renderings that airbrush conflicts out of urban scenes – like Rem Koolhaas’ mischievous new midrise, or Steven Holl’s constellation-like Shenzen experiment. Who will flag insidious design choices — like the temperature in that basement — and challenge them?

Urban design is “good” when it makes public space vibrant and makes efficient engineering seem exalted. 20 years from now, my daughter may ask why we let storm surges swallow Coney Island or let the Bronx’s waste-burning dumps shackle a generation with asthma. So I want to highlight designs that guide city residents to face each other and reuse natural resources. I’d hate to tell her that architects’ sublime renderings or elegant wording let me forget why we’re all here.

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This is the third 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.

Alec Appelbaum writes about how cities can become greener and fairer for the New York Times, the Architect’s Newspaper and others. He lives on the Lower East Side.

When I think about architecture criticism, I think of two poles represented by my two favorite critics: Jane Jacobs and Herbert Muschamp. Jane promoted common-sense principles and ideas. You shouldn’t put a highway through the middle of SoHo; a street with broken windows looks unsafe and thus will encourage crime. Herbert, on the other hand, championed risk-taking — in architecture, in writing, in life. He compared Richard Meier’s Perry Street Condos to Hitchcock blondes; in his defense of preserving the old Huntington Hartford museum he asked us to remember Henry Geldzahler, lacy underwear, swanky taste and Singapore slings. The only problem was that architecture and Herbert were twinned in their teleology of fabulousness.

And so now we’re back to Earth. We started this conversation thinking about Ada Louise Huxtable’s collected writings, and I keep looking at that picture of Ada Louise perched on a settee. She looks like a decent middle ground — chic enough, but serious, too. I usually advocate for extremes, but at the moment I’ll call for this compromise: a fantastic marriage of Jane and Herbert (both dead!). Someone advocating for common sense in architecture, but with a bit of style.

Architecture criticism has become too much of a discussion of form and ability, and not enough about context. We wouldn’t dare call Jane Jacobs an “architecture critic” now — but she wrote about how buildings function in a society. What Jane and Herbert didn’t do was write about architects. They both used the built environment to comment on how it symbolized something more profound about society. As architecture criticism has been pushed further to the outskirts of regular arts coverage, we architecture critics can’t further isolate the discussion by writing solely about an architect’s talent or a particular building’s aesthetics. Maybe it will no longer be a matter of choice. How can we write about singularity in this time of populism and interconnectedness?

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This is the second 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.

Diana Lind is a 2011 fellow at Van Alen Institute where she helped develop the ideas competition Life at the Speed of Rail. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design. Connect on Twitter @dianalindindex.

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.