A few days ago I wandered through a gigantic Barnes & Noble in a Baltimore mega-mall. Overwhelmed by the acreage and options, I drifted down the aisles: Literature. Astrology. Manga. Cooking. Investing. When I saw a section labeled ‘Urban Fiction’, I got excited and rushed toward it, imagining a bookshelf bursting with paranoid novels by JG…

This year, Postopolis was a five-day event, where bloggers of the built environment came back out from behind their keyboards, convening in a real, live urban environment. For me, this trip out west was a follow up to the first Postopolis that...

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 writing about…

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 sense the…

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 Ada…