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.

This is the sixth in an ongoing series of posts that ponder 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.

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


Sources Cited:

* “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.

This post is part of an ongoing series that invites critical reflection on data visualization and urban cartography – past, present and future. To see all entries on this topic, click here.

National Geographic

Sarah Slobin:
So you’ve seen mapping go from pencil on paper to the digital, interactive versions we have today. Tell us about some of the watershed moments you’ve witnessed.

Kris Goodfellow:
I think that watching the transformation of newsrooms from copying map books to using digital mapping tools and adopting GIS was a watershed transformation.

At the Times, there were 8 or 10 people doing maps and a maps editor checking their accuracy. The department had a history of more than 100 years. The reference material was fabulous. But when I went to AP in 1998, there were two guys doing mapping. One was an 85-year-old, World War II vet with a bad gambling habit and even worse vision. He couldn’t see all of the details on the reference material so there were a multitude of mistakes on even the most basic US map. And these were the maps most newspapers printed for major news stories. It was inefficient and the quality was terrible. We had to change.

That was really the motivation behind creating MapShop. I wanted to be able to create a map of every corner of the world, export it in Illustrator in 30 minutes. MapShop did that for AP and other newspapers.

But where we saw the adoption of professional GIS tools – at AP to be sure, but more importantly at Time and The New York Times – it was an enormous leap step forward. The work that Bill McNulty did at the Times after 9/11 and the maps of Afghanistan during the war, should be featured in a museum exhibit. They are transformational for the industry because they are so beautiful and informative and timely. These were created on deadline. That’s something that just doesn’t happen very often.

USA Today

SS: Have you seen any evidence that our ability to visualize neighborhoods has had an influence of the shape of the neighborhoods themselves?

KG: I don’t think that it works this way. Neighborhoods have a life of their own and are constantly shifting and evolving. Capturing that spirit of a neighborhood within some lines on a map is difficult. There are two schools of thought. One is that you should have lines on a map that fit together like typical political boundaries – one stops and the other begins. The other is to have overlapping boundaries so that there is room for some gray area. The first approach appeals to my personal preference for creating a clean map. But the second really fits what I know about neighborhoods much better.

cyberhomes.com

SS: As a nation we’re fascinated with real estate. Do you think new mapping technology has contributed to that?

KG: More than anything the housing boom and bust have driven our fascination with real estate. But it is a little hard to imagine this national obsession taking hold without real estate data, maps and images online. Prior to 1990 and the advent of Realtor.com, there really was no way to find a new home without going to a realtor. And prior to Zillow, there was no way to know what your home was worth without going to the assessors office or getting an appraisal.  In 2006, it was commonplace to hear, “I can’t believe how much my house is worth, I just looked it up on cyberhomes.com.” But in 1986, that comment would have been “I got my tax bill in the mail…” and that’s just beyond dull.

So as a part of all that data going online, we had to show people the location and that has led to a lot of great mapping applications from cyberhomes and others. Google and Microsoft do a great job pinning homes on a map and showing what’s around it. But as a map geek, what I love is putting that property in the context of its neighborhood using things like median home value and change in value over time. Or looking at neighborhoods that have, say, lots of 20-somethings or lots of children. Those are markers of what type of neighborhood it is and whether you, as a potential new homeowner, would fit in. Our partnerships with companies like Urban Mapping and RMM CADD have made that contextual information come alive and have helped us move beyond “You are here!” mapping.

Still, I know that people are most fascinated with their own home. My favorite comment on cyberhomes.com was from a woman who was looking at our oblique views from Bing Maps, and she said that the photo was wrong because her garage door was open in the picture online and she was looking at it right now and it was closed. She literally thought were had a satellite checking in on her house right then! Who knows, maybe someday!

cyberhomes.com

SS: What advice would you give someone who was trying to use maps to convey an idea?

KG: I’d give the same advice that I do in all visual design. Decide what one message you are trying to convey and then make everything you are doing help support that message. I think that we often have 15 great ideas for maps in our mind but haven’t applied the intellectual rigor to their execution and the result is a confusing and muddled mess.

I personally got a refresher course in simplicity working at CBS News during the 2004 elections. We created their county level map of the US results but also a host of other demographic maps. And I’d want to add city names or even state names or boundaries and they would just keep saying, it’s on air for 10 seconds, Kris. It’s got to be simple! Really, when you think about it, so is that map in your power point slide. When you are presenting something, unless it’s a dissertation, remove anything extra and keep to the point.

The other thing that I’d say, is really spend time understanding your data and making sure it is complete and accurate. There was recently a story in the LA Times about a crime mapping application that the city of LA built that is rife with errors. I see these kinds of applications being created all the time in the GIS community. You can sort of get away with it because the client assumes that the contractor is a wizard and so it must be right. But too often when you start to use that data, especially in an emergency operation center like the one I worked in after 9/11, you realize just how much sloppy work is out there and how under the gun, it matters.

CBS News

Sarah Slobin is a visual journalist. She spent 15 years at The New York Times where she was trained to report the story from the ground up, find the visual language to translate it, then write, design, chart, edit and produce information graphics. From 2006 to 2008 she was the head of graphics at Fortune Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.

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.

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of posts that ponder 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.

This is the third in an ongoing series of posts that ponder 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?

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts that ponder 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 the editor in chief of Next American City. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design.