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Changing Ideals in Architectural Criticism

In her contribution to On the Duty and Power of Architectural Criticism, "Critical Influence: The Influence of the Popular Architecture Critic on Architectural Decision-making," Kristen Harrison starts with a quote by Michael Sorkin: "I don't mean to trivialize either the function or the concept of criticism but — just like architecture — it must also be judged by its effects." I'll address that statement over the course of this post, but first I wanted to point out its origin. Sorkin said those words at the Architectural Association in London in February 2014, on the first day of a two-day symposium, "Critical Juncture," celebrating the RIBA Royal Gold Medal being given to historian and critic Joseph Rykwert. The symposium was organized by the AA, the V&A, and CICA, or International Committee of Architectural Critics, the last of which Rykwert was president of at the time (as of 2019, the latest update to the "Who's Who" section of the CICA website, the then-92-year-old was still president). Don't feel alone if your first reaction to seeing CICA is "What is CICA?" It is one of those organizations for which the word insular seems to have been invented. A publication was made for the "Critical Juncture" symposium — done, for some reason, by Docomomo Mexico — but good luck finding a copy. If you're not part of CICA, it seems, you won't know what they do, or see or read or hear about any of their gatherings.

Which makes On the Duty and Power of Architectural Criticism a bit of a shock. The book comes out of the International Conference on Architectural Criticism that CICA organized and held over the course of two weekends in October 2021. I'm not sure how many people watched the virtual proceedings (they can all be watched on YouTube), but a piece I edited for World-Architects gave me the impression that it was very few. The book, though, is published by Park Books with UTA, is distributed by University of Chicago Press, and is therefore easy to come by (it's $39 cover price is also fairly reasonable for a 320-page book with 240 illustrations, most in color). Is this CICA reaching out to a wider audience, finally breaking out of the insular bubble it has occupied since its founding in 1978? If so, it's not explicit. Wilfried Wang's introduction mentions the conference, but most of the comments in his introductory essay that follows puts the focus on the papers submitted for the conference and its overall theme, which is very much in line with the Sorkin quote at the beginning of Harrison's essay.

So what are the duty and power of architectural criticism in the third decade of the 21st century? And why is such a question being asked today? The latter is fairly self-evident for any architect paying attention to architectural criticism: The role of the architecture critic at newspapers and other traditional venues has been disappearing, as evidenced by Who Is the City For?, the latest collection of Blair Kamin's articles as the Chicago Tribune architecture critic; it will be the last such collection — following Why Architecture Matters (2003) and Terror and Wonder (2011) — since he stepped down from that post in early 2021. (More on Kamin's book shortly.) If the duty and power in architectural criticism, since at least the days of Ada Louise Huxtable last century, was to shape public opinion and have an impact on the form of buildings and cities, what are the duty and power of architectural criticism today, when those conduits to a wider audience have shifted from newspapers to specialized journals, websites, and newsletters? If we believe Wang, whose introductory essay shapes how many readers will tackle the book, climate change is the defining issue that architects should be addressing and architecture critics should as well. But if we venture elsewhere, such as NYRA, issues of equity and labor are as important as climate change; in fact they are intertwined with it and other issues well above considerations of form and aesthetics.

Devised before the pandemic but taking place in the midst of it, the On the Duty and Power of Architectural Criticism conference and related publication both suffer and benefit from the usual scholarly structure. More than 100 abstracts were submitted to the open call, after which 32 were selected following blind peer reviews, and finally 16 of those were chosen to present papers during the conference; the book features the last in five thematic chapters (Origins and Approaches, High Culture in Conflict, Criticism and Its Effects, Explicit Criticism, Critical Reflections) alongside additional contributions by CICA committee members. Positive aspects of the process are the diversity of submissions and the strength of their scholarship, while the flip side is the fact many papers are only tangentially related to the theme. I was intrigued by the theme, so I honed in on contributions, like Harrison's, whose abstracts indicate an attempt on the part of the author to address the theme. One highlight is "The End of Architectural Criticism?" by Zheng Shiling from Tongji University in Shanghai. After breezing through the history of architectural criticism and touching on some of the few events focused on the field, such as the "Architectural Criticism and Journalism: Global Perspectives" seminar in 2005, he states that "architectural criticism in the form of jury service for architectural design competitions is playing an increasingly important role." I agree though find such a role — or duty — appropriate in China and in Europe but lacking in the United States, where most buildings are created outside of the scope of a competition. (That said, occasionally critics in the US are hired as consultants by developers and other clients to help select architects for projects or determine architects for invited competitions, the latter most notably with Paul Goldberger and the Obama Presidential Center.)

Now is a good time to return to Harrison's essay, "Critical Influence: The Influence of the Popular Architecture Critic on Architectural Decision-making," another highlight in the book. She looks at critical reactions to the Mirvish+Gehry Toronto project, designed by Frank Gehry and first unveiled in 2012, written by Christopher Hume, Lisa Rochon, and Alex Bozikovic, putting them into the context of three "theoretical groundings": Architectural Judgment by Peter Collins, Architecture and Critical Imagination by Wayne Attoe, and a pair of essays by Michael Sorkin ("Critical Measures," from the 2014 symposium in London; and "Everybody's a Critic!," first published in Architectural Criticism and Journalism [PDF download] and later included in All Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities). Simply put, Collins and Attoe, both writing in the 1970s, did not see the critic as having any influence on decision-making, while Sorkin argued that critics — professional and otherwise — were an active part of the political process. The three Canadian critics were writing about the Gehry project before it was built, and even before it was approved by the city, thereby giving them the potential to shape the project. The three-tower residential project was eventually downscaled to two towers, and the extent of demolition required for the project also decreased, but it's not clear from later comments by the critics, particularly Bozikovic, in Harrison's piece if their words had any bearing on the project's evolution. 

One critic more than willing to partake in such a political process is Blair Kamin, who was the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic for nearly 30 years, from 1992, when he succeeded Paul Gapp, who died that  year, to 2021, when he took a buyout from the publisher of the Tribune (unlike Gapp, Kamin will not have a successor at the paper). Such participation was especially the case when it came to the lakefront, the setting for his series of articles that won him the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in 1999. In the ten years that comprise the 55 columns compiled in Who Is the City For?, the project he most vocally opposed and tried to reshape was the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, designed by MAD Architects for a site east of Lake Shore Drive between Soldier Field and McCormick Place. Kamin was hardly the only critic with qualms about it, but in addition to criticizing the design's "blob architecture," he proposed an alternate site on the other side of LSD, as a means of keeping the museum wanted by the mayor and many residents in Chicago but moving it off Kamin's beloved lakefront — and maybe even making the design less an alien insertion and more contextual to Chicago.

Kamin's "George Lucas's Museum Proposal Is Needlessly Massive" (November 6, 2014) is one of the 55 articles in the new book. I'm guessing it was his first Tribune piece on the project, but it was far from the last. In lieu of including more of them, the single Lucas Museum article in the book comes with a postscript — as many, but not all, of the articles have — updating readers on the project's legal hurdles and Lucas's decision to move it to Los Angeles, where it is nearing completion. Generally, these postscripts also give Kamin the opportunity to align his writings with the notion of equity that is in the book's title and is a widespread concern in post-George Floyd America; if the equity concerns were an overriding aspect of the original critiques is another question. Outside of the lakefront he was a staunch defender of for decades, is Kamin's record on equity strong? Does he come close to Michael Sorkin, for instance, whose writings on small-d democracy and the right to the city were overt and consistent over decades? 

If Zach Mortice's review of Kamin's book at The Architect's Newspaper is any indication, and I find myself siding with him, the answers are muddled. Kamin occasionally tackled subjects that pushed him beyond how a particular building looks, but "despite the book’s stated emphasis on equity," Mortice writes, "that’s not what this book does." In other words, Kamin's columns do not unpack the myriad historical and contemporary issues underlying the expansive disparities of equity in Chicago, regardless of the "equity" subtitle, the postscripts, and the photographs by Lee Bey, one-time Chicago Sun-Times architecture critic (he is now an editorial board member at the paper) and author of Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago's South Side. I had read most of Kamin's articles in Who Is the City For? when they were first published in the Tribune (ditto with those in the other two collections mentioned above, which coincided with the years I lived in Chicago) so the book did not offer much new for me, outside of the postscripts and Bey's photos in black and white. Ultimately, the book came across to me as a means of reframing Kamin's writings within the present moment.

Although it's not clear what Kamin will do next, it's safe to say Who Is the City For? will be the last collection of his critiques. It wouldn't surprise me if it's also the last such collection for any critic — outside of maybe a posthumous collection devoted to Michael Sorkin's writings from What Goes Up in 2018 to his death in March 2020 (if one is in the works or if there's enough material, I'm not sure, but my fingers are crossed). With a drastic reduction in the number of full-time architecture critics in the US this century, and with critics such as Michael Kimmelman taking on the title but writing absurdly infrequently (8 articles in 2022?!), anthologies of single-author critical writings like Kamin's or those shown below feel like a thing of the past. Architectural criticism is broadening, in the vein of Sorkin's "Everybody's a Critic!," and so are the subjects it tackles, pushing the field well beyond aesthetic appreciation. Less than roadmaps of the way forward, On the Duty and Power of Architectural Criticism and Who Is the City For? capture the situation architectural criticism now finds itself in.
Postscript on Design: Aside from the content of the words within the two books reviewed above, some critiques of their graphic design is in order. I side with Swiss-Architects editor Elias Baumgarten in his appraisal of On the Duty and Power of Architectural Criticism, when he writes that the choice of font (Neue Haas Grotesk light) and the layout of paragraphs and footnotes is "incomprehensible, especially for a book that lives from its carefully crafted texts and aspires to be read thoroughly." Additionally, the omission of an index is frustrating, considering the breadth of topics covered and the many people named throughout. Kamin's book does not have these issues (the text is easy on the eyes and there is an index), but it would have benefited from a larger page size and four-color printing to take better advantage of Bey's photographs. A larger page size would also have allowed for two columns of text, echoing the origins of the critiques in the Tribune and potentially allowing full-width postscripts to better stand out from the original texts.
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