Architecture is the least thoroughly covered arts beat at most American newspapers. Among the approximately 140 dailies with a circulation above 75,000, fewer than 45 have an architecture critic, and only a third of those journalists pursue architecture criticism full-time.
The field has undeniably come a long way since Ada Louise Huxtable became a pioneer of modern architecture journalism in The New York Times, almost thirty years ago. But several of the nation’s largest cities lack full-time architecture critics. Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest metropolitan area, lacks one. So do Detroit, Sacramento and Kansas City. Three of the New York City metropolitan area’s four daily newspapers have no regularly publishing architecture critic. Neither does the nation’s second-largest newspaper, USA Today.
Forty writers identified by themselves or their editors as architecture critics (representing 37 newspapers with a combined daily circulation of 12,040,253 and Sunday circulation of 17,226,467) qualified for and completed our survey—the first ever in-depth investigation of the handful of men and women who shape the newspaper-reading public’s view of architecture. These critics represent newspapers ranging in size from the Los Angeles Times (circulation 1,071,296) to the Newport News Daily Press (92,546). Together, they comprise the overwhelming majority of architecture critics currently active in the nation’s newsrooms.
Prior studies by the National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP) have already shed light on weaknesses in arts coverage in the news. The situation of architecture criticism is a cause for particular concern. In Reporting the Arts: News Coverage of Arts and Culture in America (1999), the NAJP analyzed a national sampling of papers and found that arts and culture stories tended to receive less editorial space than business or sports stories, not to mention hard news. The most scarcely covered arts discipline was visual arts, and architecture ranked last among the visual-arts subdisciplines. While the figures vary from paper to paper, architecture vies with dance for the distinction of being the smallest niche of the smallest beat of the smallest department in most newspapers.
The low commitment to staffing and editorial space for architecture criticism is alarming in view of the building boom that cities around the nation have experienced in recent years. Prosperity has stimulated investment in private and public architecture. Institutions and municipalities are hiring brand-name designers for new projects. Corporations are building trophy headquarters and retail environments. Architecture has become a linchpin of wide-spread and often arts-based urban revitalization. Scores of new museums, libraries, performing arts centers, beautified ports, and downtowns herald the dynamism of recent years. In the midst of this efflorescence, however, a majority of newspaper readers lack the benefit of hearing regularly from an authoritative local architecture critic.
Architecture is the most public art form and, curiously, the least subject to public debate. In the absence of public discourse over architecture, control of new construction inevitably falls into the hands of bureaucrats and developers. The stakes, therefore, are higher than the count of column inches and newsroom staff suggest. While high-profile architecture is thriving in the United States, as our survey findings attest, the sprawl of generic construction that is engulfing most communities nationwide underscores the news media’s responsibility to nurture a thorough critique of the built environment.
In the spring of 2001, we asked architecture critics to complete an on-line questionnaire about their positions at their newspapers, their roles within the community, their relationships with the profession of architects and builders, and their theoretical influences and aesthetic preferences. The key findings, while presenting a mixed picture, allow for a more fine-grained understanding of the activities and challenges of architecture critics working at newspapers:
More than half of all architecture critics write about the topic part time. Part-time critics write far fewer stories than their full-time counterparts.
Architecture stories are rarely featured on the front page. One-fourth of the newspapers involved in this report ran no architecture stories on page A-l for the six months prior to the survey. Another one-fourth published only one.
More than three-fourths of critics feel their writing had an impact on architecture in their region, but more than half say architects and developers do not consider their opinions when designing new projects.
While most critics feel positively about the current state of architecture as an art form, they are deeply concerned about the overall development of the built environment.
Many architecture critics go beyond opinion about the aesthetics of individual buildings, including reporting on sprawl and urban development. At the same time, they express regret that the field pays too much attention to the work of popular architects.
Many architecture critics have conservative tastes, rating early-20th-century buildings, particularly those of Frank Lloyd Wright, well ahead of more recent ones.
Many critics rate postmodern architects poorly, but agree that postmodernism was a good influence on late-20th-century architecture.
Despite their small numbers and low exposure, architecture critics feel their work is respected within their newspapers and by their readers, though more than half believe their newspapers would not make it a priority to replace them if they left their jobs.
Critics have significant experience. Four out of five respondents have written about architecture for more than five years, and two-thirds for more than ten years.
Nearly all critics believe their readers care about the built environment, and most feel those readers have a basic understanding of architecture. Three-fourths of critics see themselves as educators.
As mentioned, we drew our critics from the roughly 140 newspapers whose daily ABC circulation exceeded 75,000 as of June 30, 1999. Our defining criterion was that a critic must have written six or more evaluative pieces about architecture within the 12-month period preceding the survey. We did not include home design, real estate, or urban design writers, nor did we include journalists whose architecture writing focused exclusively on news, features, and profiles.
We distributed our survey on-line to 47 critics, a few of whom, we discovered, did not qualify, and a few of whom—including critics from The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—did not complete the questionnaire.
The average daily circulation of newspapers in our study was 301,006. The likelihood of a newspaper having an architecture critic drops off sharply between 200,000 and 250,000 circulation. Half of newspapers with a circulation figure between 220,000 and 240,000 have a critic; only 20 percent of papers between 185,000 and 200,000 have one. Of the approximately 40 newspapers between 75,000 and 100,000 circulation, only the Newport News Daily Press reported having an architecture critic.
Three newspapers had two qualifying critics, and, to our surprise, all three—the Toledo Blade, the Providence Journal, and The Austin American- Statesman—were among the smaller newspapers in our survey. This can be explained in part by the fact that architecture criticism is not a full-time beat at these newspapers.
The field of architectural criticism, although small, is perpetually evolving. Today, as an ever-wider segment of the newspaper reading public takes an active interest in architecture and urban design, the need for informed comment on the built environment has never been greater. Home sales are at record highs, prompting interest in the shape of buildings, neighborhoods, and cities. The nation is experiencing a major phase of migration, economic expansion, and urban renewal, coupled with fascinating new phenomena like the “urbanizing suburb” and the proliferation of theme architecture. Such changes confront architecture critics with new challenges and newspapers with new opportunities. The findings of this report draw attention to the importance of further investment into architecture criticism, especially in medium-size newspapers and in smaller communities, where some of the most dramatic changes in the built environment are currently taking shape.
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Who the Critics Are
Demographically speaking, architecture critics lack diversity, potentially influencing the way they, as a group, view the built environment. Male architecture critics outnumber their female peers almost three to one. Additionally, the critics are nearly all white. More than three-fourths live in an urban setting.
If we were to consider these critics as a political bloc, they would be far to the left. Three-fourths designated themselves as either liberal or progressive. They apparently followed through on those convictions in the last election: Thirty-one voted for Democrat Al Gore and five voted for Republican George W. Bush. Four respondents chose not to reveal how they voted.
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Critical Attitudes
In attempting to capture the critics’ aesthetic leanings, we avoided using broad terms to characterize various styles or movements, asking instead for the critics’ opinions of specific buildings, writers and architects. Critics were asked to rate items in lists in those three categories, allowing us to numerically rank each item within each of the three lists. We intended our lists of names to represent not just the individual buildings, architects, or writers, but also to broadly suggest various approaches to architecture. If every writer chose Jane Jacobs as the most influential writer on architecture, that would have certain implications about their aesthetic as a group; if everybody chose Rem Koolhaas, something very different would be suggested.
Buildings
Critics were asked to rate 29 individual buildings (on a list concentrating mostly on the last 150 years and comprised of generally well-known works) on a four-point scale: “like a great deal,” “like somewhat,” “dislike somewhat,” and “dislike a great deal.” (“No opinion” was also an option.)
Responses suggested a strong correlation between public popularity and critical recognition. The three highest-rated works of architecture were the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Station, and the Chrysler Building. The building ratings ranged from just shy of 2.0 (representing “like a great deal”) to just above -1.0 (“dislike somewhat”), though only the World Trade Center, among the 29 buildings, ranked that low.
A separate, open-ended question asked respondents to write in their three favorite recent buildings. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, Richard Meier’s Getty Center, and James Stewart Polshek’s Rose Center for Earth and Space headed that list, receiving many more mentions than other buildings.
Architects
There was little correlation between popular architects and architects who are critically acclaimed. The range of ratings that critics gave to practicing architects was narrower than the range given to buildings. Respondents rated individual architects on the same four-point scale. None of the architects received a plurality of unfavorable ratings; on a scale between +2 (like a great deal) and -2 (dislike a great deal) no architect listed on the questionnaire was rated below zero.
Frank Gehry topped the list of practicing architects, but Getty Center architect Richard Meier received only a middle-of-the-pack rating, despite the many citations of the Getty as being among the best three recent buildings. And Gehry’s work is not held in unequivocally high esteem. The high ratings for Gehry as an architect and for his Guggenheim Bilbao didn’t carry over to his recently completed Experience Music Project in Seattle, which received lower ratings from most critics.
Renzo Piano rated a close second to Gehry —though his most famous work, the Centre Pompidou, designed in collaboration with Richard Rogers, was not highly ranked by the critics. These two well known architects were followed by a professionally admired architect with a lower public profile, Santiago Calatrava. The next on the list was Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, who has only a few architectural credits, albeit impressive ones.
The critics delivered generally low ratings for architects associated with late-20th-century postmodernism. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Michael Graves, Robert A.M. Stern, and Philip Johnson all ranked in the bottom half of the ratings spectrum. Indeed, Johnson, one of the few household-name architects in the nation, received the lowest rating from the critics from the list of designers in the survey. His oeuvre was singled out by one critic for a tally of “any buildings you dislike a great deal.” Another critic’s entry for that category: “any remnants of 80s pomo stuff wearing fancy hats.”
This antipathy toward postmodernism might not come as a surprise, as this strain of architecture belongs to the always-unfashionable recent past. Moreover, it is tempered by the fact that a clear majority of the respondents agreed with the statement, “The postmodern movement was, on the whole, a positive influence on architecture.”
While critics signal ambiguity on postmodernism, they do not subscribe to the latest fashions in architecture. Architects who are known to rely heavily on critical theory and deconstruction were clustered near the bottom of the list. Among the five least favorably rated architects is a group of theory-oriented deconstructionists: Zaha Hadid, Bernard Tschumi, Greg Lynn, and Peter Eisenman.
Writers and Theorists
Critics’ ratings of architecture writers and theorists indicate a similar categorical disfavor of critical theory. Peter Eisenman, Michel Foucault, and Bernard Tschumi, all favorites of the current theory-based architectural crowd, were rated just above the bottom of the list, whereas the highest ratings were generally given to urbanist and new-urbanist writers.
Jane Jacobs was ranked as the most influential writer on architecture, approached only by Ada Louise Huxtable. Jacobs’ writing celebrates vernacular architecture and is more concerned with the healthy workings of dense urban environments than in discussing individual works of architecture. But not far below Jacobs in the rankings, coming in fourth, was her frequent target, Lewis Mumford, who advocated the kind of spread out, garden-city, towers-in-a-park urbanism that Jacobs despised.
Vincent Scully was just ahead of Mumford, while the writings of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, best known for Learning from Las Vegas (and proponents, though in a much different way than Jacobs, of a vernacular approach to urban design) came just behind him. Taken together, these findings suggest a focus on urbanism as strong or stronger than the focus on individual buildings. Jacobs, Mumford, and Venturi and Scott Brown are all urbanistic thinkers, though the group’s aesthetic and design sensibilities are quite different. This finding suggests architecture critics’ deep concern for larger urban design issues.
Critics were invited to write in the names of other architecture writers and thinkers whose work influenced them. While this produced a grab bag of answers, particularly noticeable were the names of three critics who write for general audiences: Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker, Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times, and Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune. (The Tribune and Times were also widely cited in response to a fill-in-the-blank question asking critics’ opinions of the best newspaper for architecture criticism.) These names are unsurprising—Goldberger and Kamin are Pulitzer Prize winners, and Muschamp is probably the most widely read architecture critic in the main-stream press. But the frequent mention of Kamin, whose prize came as a result of his coverage of Chicago lakefront parks development, fits with the general theme of critics’ placing a high value on engaging larger urban issues in architecture writing.
An Urbanist Aesthetic?
The survey did not turn up unambiguous evidence of a general critical aesthetic, but certain results were suggestive. Though critics may be happy with developments in architecture over the past 25 years or so (the rough extent of what’s considered the postmodern era in architecture), four-fifths of those surveyed disagreed with the statement, “We can be proud of the new built environment we have developed over the past 25 years.” This seeming contradiction likely points to the difference between “architecture” and “built environment.”
Issues of sprawl and suburban development rated highly among our surveyed critics. More than nine out of ten critics believe government should make “sprawl” a policy priority. They don’t see themselves as writing only about the products of high-end architecture, and most cover issues like “downtown redevelopment” and “issues of urban sprawl and the environment” (almost all said they regularly or occasionally cover those two topics).
In light of those concerns, the high popularity of writers who go beyond individual buildings to write about the city as an environment or organism is understandable. Though they may not have much in common ideologically, well-rated writers Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Venturi and Scott Brown, Duany and Plater-Zyberk, and Le Corbusier all share a concern with the city.
An urbanist orientation is the most general thread running through the answers, possibly shedding light on the low ratings of architects who focus on the building as theoretical problem or art object, in contrast to architects who focus on the urban fabric. The urbanist orientation of the critics is supported by several responses to the open-ended question, “What do you think a piece of architectural criticism should accomplish?” The phrases “larger context” and “built environment” appeared in several critics’ responses to the question, suggesting an engagement with more than just individual buildings seen in isolation.
One response that could stand for many others stated that criticism should serve a didactic role: it “should teach readers how to think critically about their homes, buildings, communities, and the built environment in general.”
Several responses drew out political concerns. “Criticism should push especially hard for quality public spaces, because those are the only spaces the poor have. The rich can cloister themselves in private resorts or gated enclaves, but the sidewalks, parks, and streetscapes of our cities belong to everyone,” one critic wrote, speaking for others among the vast majority of critics who claimed liberal political beliefs. Another critic confessed, “I think excessive growth and development is the major problem facing society today. We should be figuring out ways not to build, not acting as if the aesthetics of what does get built is the important issue.”
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Voice from the Field
Jon Jerde, FAIA, The Jerde Partnership
[Designer of Horton Plaza, 1984 Olympics, Bellagio, Roppongi Hills, and Other Projects]
“There is no doubt that architecture criticism in U.S. newspapers can expand the audience for architecture, both in provoking interest and in educating the general public and prospective clients. The large audiences for architecture and design exhibitions at museums around the world is evidence that this interest exists. What must change, however, is the narrow focus of the existing coverage and the architecture-speak which eludes accessibility for most readers.
“Architects, for the most part, have been entranced by the static object throughout the history of architecture. Architecture critics cover almost exclusively the sculptural monuments of the celebrity architect; this focus neglects important ideas and work that are redefining what architecture is today. The Jerde Partnership, for instance, fabricates rich, experiential places that inspire and engage the human spirit. Hundreds of millions of people experience these projects. Yet, our work is more likely to be covered by the general interest media, such as CNN’s ‘Newsstand’; ABC News’ ‘Nightline’; or Wired magazine. The language and the content must engage the interested reader. Many architecture critics write for a narrow, elitist audience and focus only on a handful of celebrities whose work and ideas may or may not be relevant or appropriate for the newspaper audience.”
Reprinted with permission from The Architecture Critic: a Survey of Newspaper Architecture Critics in America, András Szántó, Eric Fredericksen, and Ray Rinaldi, eds. (New York: National Arts Journalism Program, Columbia University, 2001). András Szántó is deputy director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Eric Fredericksen is the director of Western Bridge, a contemporary art space in Seattle. He was a Mid-Career Fellow of the National Arts Journalism program in 2000-2001. Ray Rinaldi is a Fellow of the National Arts Journalism Program.
Photo illustration by Ragina Johnson.
Originally published 1st quarter 2004 in arcCA 04.1, “Press Check.”
