There was a summit of architecture critics last week to launch Alexandra Lange’s new book Writing About Architecture. Julie Iovine scored points early on, when she said that good writing mattered far more than good criticism. She read extraordinary passages from Reyner Banham and Esther McCoy out loud, which landed those authors on my must-read list. Then she lost points at the end when she said that architects can’t write, a generalization that hits awfully close to home. The emotional highlight was when Lange read a famous excerpt from the late Herbert Muschamp’s 1997 New York Times Magazine cover story on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. In the passage, which was even excerpted in the writer’s obituary, Muschamp describes returning to his hotel room at Bilbao, seeing a woman in a white dress on the street below, and, all at once, understanding something vital about the building. He writes, “[T]he building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe." Fifteen years later the panelists still found the reference "galling” (Iovine’s word) and rattled on about the eccentricities of the writing, including its stupendous length, starchitect worship, hyperbole, and mythopoetic prose.

Their stony reactions sent me back to the original text, in which Muschamp follows the Marilyn reference with this lucid perception: “What twins the actress and the building in my memory is that both of them stand for an American style of freedom. That style is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child… " Muschamp’s essay is, in addition to a hagiography of Gehry and a critical account of the building, an attempt to understand architecture as a popular culture and to claim, for just one moment, in a tumbling world order, an American cultural victory. It’s rich and magnificent overwriting, which often happens when a serious writer tackles a subject that matters dearly to him. Here the building seems too big for the writing, even Muschamp’s writing, and remains, somehow, just out of reach. The heated language makes it clear that Muschamp loves architecture, something that’s not so clear about the critics on the panel.

March 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses

October 17, 2011 by Nalina Moses

There’s a great description Le Frak City, the housing complex in Corona, Queens, in Gary Shteyngart’s book Super Sad True Love Story. Lenny Abramov, the novel’s hero, compares the balconied, brick buildings to “soot-covered accordions,” and bemoans their “ugly gigantism." It’s striking because Le Frak City isn’t even a housing project; it was developed in 1962 as a haven for working- and middle-class New Yorkers. But there’s something about exurban housing complexes like this, that pack hundreds of units into enormous, freestanding volumes, that always gives them a whiff of sadness. Via Verdi, the new Bronx housing development for low-income workers that Michael Kimmelman, the new New York Times architecture critic, reviews in his first piece, has this same aspect. And yet Kimmelman doesn’t make note of it.

Kimmelman, who had been an art critic at the paper, states pretty clearly that he’s interested in the "cultural and civic aspect of architecture” more than its indelible, physical qualities. He applauds green design elements like cross-ventilation and ceiling fans. And he applauds “healthy” design elements, like windowed staircases that lure people away from elevators, and a roof garden where residents can grow their own vegetables. But he doesn’t give us a sense of what the architecture is; he doesn’t even tell us what the building is clad with. And he takes the unsophisticated point of view that “… for Via Verde the question was what a housing development on its own could do to shape and change behavior." This is just as condescending as the rendering on the splash page of the Via Verde website, that shows black residents growing tomatoes and cradling a basket of onions. Kimmelman is writing about a city building that we’d all like to know more about, and he describes the history of the project well. But he is not writing about architecture.

May 21, 2011 by Nalina Moses

For many years, along with Melville and Proust, Ada Louise Huxtable has languished on my need-to-read list. This highly accomplished architecture critic, who wrote many years for the New York Times and now writes, occasionally, for the Wall Street Journal, is beloved by both design types and lay people.

Well, last week I picked up a compilation of her work, “On Architecture,” and I simply fell right inside of it. Huxtable is a dazzling voice. A building is so many things: art object, infrastructure, civic space, machine, mythology. More so than any other contemporary critic I know, she can get at a building at all these levels all at once, and in the relatively short format of a newspaper column. She has a vast knowledge of architecture and history and New York. And she’s a savvy, supple writer. She dips into both vernacular and literary language and, as much as it is possible when writing sanely about architecture, she lets it fly. I’ve always held Paul Kael and Peter Schjeldahl in the highest esteem as critics because their passion for what they are writing about is matched by their passion for language. Now I’m adding Huxtable to that list.

March 11, 2011 by Nalina Moses

If there is anyone more annoying than an Architect, it is an Architecture Critic. These are folks who write about something that, when done properly, cannot be written. Yet there I was on Tuesday night, packed into the damp, cramped, and drafty Storefront for Art and Architecture, listening to a panel discussion about the state of contemporary architecture criticism. The critics on the panel did not disappoint, using words like “modality,” “temporalities” and, with disarming frequency, “criticalities." Panelists from England and Italy lent the proceedings a cosmopolitan flair. And the woman moderating the panel wore a fluttering yellow Post-it note as an earring. Was she waiting for an idea to arrive?

Each time a critic took the hand-mic to speak it flared up and buzzed like a light saber. That only brought to mind how bloodless the discussion really was. The critics commented lucidly about the decreasing authority of print media and the rising popularity of new media. They expressed reverence for magazines like Domus, and for the days when architecture critics had travel budgets. But they exhibited no real concern for architecture or for writing. The conversation remained meta-critical and, ultimately, rather tame.