Last summer, a co-worker stopped by my desk to make a pitch, ever-so-politely, for me to review the new building at her daughter’s high school. The school had just finished a gym with an attractive, iconic, head-turning curved metal roof. Everyone was excited, she said, and it really was striking.
The conversation resumed a few months later via email. Had I gone by? Not only that, get this—the gym had received an honor award from the local branch of the AIA. Any progress on that review?
To which I responded that I knew about the award because, in fact, I had been on the jury (helped sway the lone skeptic, I didn’t add). And yes I had stopped by … and no, no plans to review it, because I honestly saw nothing in the building that might serve as a springboard for a discussion with the million or so readers who skim the Chronicle on any given day.
All of which is an extremely roundabout way of saying that, when you write about buildings for general readers, the readers come first.
No doubt this frustrates architects—even more so their publicists—and I don’t blame you. Here you craft some consummate example of small-scale sustainability, and those clods in the press don’t care. Or they shrug off your butterfly-roof, ultra-clear glass, blob-like data processing center near Chico that is a shoo-in for an AR “Building Types Study.”
I feel your pain. I especially feel your pain when that data processing center is pretty cool. But here’s the catch: who cares? You may think it’s cool, I may think it’s cool, folks pulling in to the parking lot outside Chico may think it’s cool—but unless there’s something about that building that will resonate with general readers of a daily newspaper, there’s not any good reason for me to write about it.
Does this translate to a declaration that only big buildings or tall buildings or local examples of starchitecture merit coverage? Not at all.
Architectural criticism in newspapers these days falls into two camps. One treats the subject essentially as a branch of the high arts, an intellectual discipline and rhetorical exercise in which quality is measured by how well or poorly a particular design reflects some pure quality of invention (thanks, Mr. Muschamp, you can put down your hand now). The other focuses on something much different: the built terrain, the existing context, how things fit together and whether or not the building/plaza/proposal is likely to make life around it better or worse.
While members of this latter camp appreciate architecture in and of itself, we’re also looking for subjects that add an extra dimension to the tale. Not only do I want to write about buildings that are in the public eye when they open; from an urban design viewpoint it is equally essential to find and critique the suburban shopping center that best captures how that world is changing, or dense infill housing that might give pointers on how to fold people into existing communities by adding quality, not just quantity. It’s a search for structures with implications—implications that will resonate with readers who have never seen the buildings in question, or who think Glenn Murcutt is a journeyman infielder.
Still, this approach means that good buildings do fall by the wayside. A home of austere minimalism in the cultivated wilds of Sonoma has no general lessons to teach. The same goes for the design of interior spaces, or restorations of older buildings. They might be wonderful, they might demonstrate innovations that your peers can learn from, but if that’s as far as it goes….
Another factor—one that’s even more exasperating, I suspect—is that critics don’t want to make the same explicit point over and over and over again.
Case at hand: the transformation of San Francisco’s Ferry Building (and for those of you who haven’t seen it, yes, it does deserve the hype). Besides being a great example of adaptive restoration, the changed spaces and new uses have a remarkable cultural dimension—they show that preservation must be flexible enough to respond to society’s changes beyond the purist dogma of just-put-back-what-was-there. But once you write about the Ferry Building and those implications at length—as I did last September—there’s not a lot to say for awhile about other good new examples of preservation that argue the same point in more muted tones.
Fair? Not especially. But newspaper subscribers don’t take blood vows to read everything that appears in the paper. To lure them, each story needs to start fresh, and a constant reemphasis of the same themes only chases casual readers away.
The difference between the high and low camps is a matter of emphasis, not an absolute division; even those of us who view individual creations as one piece in the puzzle want that piece to be as good as possible. Besides, any good critic can’t help but become a bit of a snob. When you see really exquisite new buildings, where the creativity and vision of the architect add unexpected dimensions—and the physical quality of what’s built lives up to the artistic potential—it changes your perceptions the next time you take a tour of something that’s “good, but….”
That said, I’m uncomfortable with particular critics trumpeting particular styles. I have my own aesthetic preferences and personal favorite architects … (long pause) … but what’s more important from this critic’s perspective is whether a building makes sense in its location, whether it is well-built with good materials, whether it feels good (and not in a condescending, carefully branded way). In short, whether it strengthens the weave of the larger urban fabric.
As for the final question everyone asks: no, I’m not told what to write. My opinions are not vetted by higher-ups. The only filtering that takes place comes when, heaven forbid, I use phrases that would make a member of the design community nod with recognition.
Fact is, any phrase more rarified than “columns” meets a skeptical reception; “you’ve lost me,” a high-up editor said when I referred to how the towers on a bridge created “portals.” And when I happily used the apt metaphor of “Mondrianesque” to describe a set of five residential buildings proposed for Market Street in San Francisco, to be safe I ran the reference by a younger editor—who responded with a blank stare. Which is why the review compares the design approach to “random patterns in a cubist painting.” Architectural criticism, like architecture itself, is an art of the possible.
Author John King is the urban design writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2002 and 2003.
Photo illustration by Ragina Johnson.
Originally published 1st quarter 2004 in arcCA 04.1, “Press Check.”
