Critique | Architectural Record

Strolling through Tokyo’s hothouse of architectural wonders
The cherry blossoms were at their peak on a Thursday in late March when I went for a stroll in Ueno Park in Tokyo. A nimbus of white glowing pink with dramatic dark branches etched through it floated above the crowds strolling, photographing, and picnicking on blue tarps spread beneath the trees. What could be more Japanese than such civic reverence for this short-lived phenomenon in all its tender aesthetic frailty?

Photo © Christian Richters

Shedding new light on a pair of maligned projects
A few random field notes on Renzo Piano’s new Broad Contemporary Art Museum building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Machado and Silvetti's Getty Villa.

Beyond Blubberland: In the land of the super plenty
The noun want used to mean need. Want was life or death stuff, as in “the baby wants feeding.” Now, want has flipped 180 degrees to imply an arbitrary and even whimsical desire, unfettered by need, significance, or logic.

Photo © Alex S. Maclean

Debunking a myth about museums that pay for themselves
It may not have been cause and effect, but the 10th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao late last year coincided with the opening of several new museums that seem intent on being everything Frank Gehry’s Basque bombshell is not.

Photo © David S. Allee

American Architecture Today
Six accomplished critics weigh in on the state of American architecture today. Read comments by Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker, Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times, Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune, among others.

Image courtesy Gehry Partners

Making (too) big plans for Manhattan’s West Side
New York’s powerful deputy mayor for economic development, Dan Doctoroff, recently resigned, something that had been rumored for a time. Doctoroff, who came to the city from a master-of-the-universe career as a private equity dealer, has left—with scarcely a murmur of disapproval—to become head of Bloomberg L.P., the Mayor’s very own multibillion-dollar financial reporting company.

Image courtesy Steven Holl

Why Foster’s Hearst Tower is no gherkin
Now that it has been there for a year and I’ve had my chance to learn to love it, maybe it’s a good time to say why I dislike the Hearst Tower in Manhattan so much.

Photo © Chuck Choi

Legal loophole trumps good zoning in SoHo
The form of the city rises from the convergence of legislation, imagination, ambition, and resistance.

Rendering © Courtesy Trump SoHo

Experiencing architecture with seven senses, not one
Is architecture turning into a purely visual sport? Will it be just like video games, except that it won’t have all those crashing noises?

Photo © Jeff Goldberg/ESTO

Artists tackle architecture and find new ways of looking at it
In the catalog for Antony Gormley’s recent exhibition, Blind Light, at the Hayward Gallery in London, the curator Jacky Klein cites Brancusi’s dictum that “architecture is inhabited sculpture.”

Photo © Michele Lamanna/Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch Gallery

Big Brother hitches a ride with a congestion-pricing scheme
As part of his recently released plan for New York by the year 2030, entitled PLANYC: A Greener, Greater New York, Mayor Michael Blooomberg is actively promoting a scheme for congestion pricing in the busiest parts of Manhattan.

Photo © Leon Neal/AFP/Getty images

Going the extra mile to make mass transit more personal
For too long, too much of the discussion about urban mobility and its relationship to sustainability has been locked into an increasingly sterile debate between proponents of public transit and advocates of the automobile. Both sides ignore some inconvenient truths.

Calling a truce in the style wars over government buildings
"The development of an official style must be avoided. Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa.”

The words are those of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They’re part of his famous Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture (1962), which helped inspire a revolution in government architecture.

Can an indigenous culture survive in a jungle petropolis?
Pink Floyd was playing on the loudspeaker of the ferry transporting us over the Rio Napo into the 2,700-square-mile Yasuni National Park in the Amazon basin in Ecuador’s El Oriente region.

Three years later: Does Gehry’s Stata Center really work?
When Frank Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT opened three years ago, it got a lot of press, especially for its novel appearance.

Does size matter when it comes to design offices and quality?
Once upon a time, Le Corbusier sat in his single-room office alone, pencil in hand, solemnly pondering an architectural problem, “face to face with himself, the wrestling of Jacob and the Angel within the human soul,” as he explained in volume eight of Oeuvres Complètes.