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Places: Survey finds critics are few and far between
Wednesday, June 27, 2001 By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette architecture critic
While architecture is the most public of art forms, it's the least subject to public debate in most of the nation's newspapers.
That's one of the findings of the first-ever online survey of 40 architecture critics writing for daily American newspapers.
"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," reports the survey, conducted by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. "But several of the nation's largest cities lack full-time architecture critics," including Houston, Detroit, Sacramento and Kansas City. And more than half of the critics write about architecture on only a part-time basis.
"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," the survey reports.
The survey also asked critics to rank buildings, architects and writers/theorists from prepared lists. While I'm sure I wasn't the only one uncomfortable with participating in what seemed like a popularity contest among candidates I had no voice in selecting, the survey report indicates the goal was 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 Koolhas, something very different would be suggested."
As it happened, Jacobs received the highest number of "very influential" responses (20) as the writer/theorist who most influenced their thinking, followed by Huxtable, Vincent Scully, Lewis Mumford, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown -- right in line with the revelation that critics have a higher regard for urban fabric than for individual buildings.
While the survey did not "turn up unambiguous evidence of a general critical aesthetic," it did show "an urbanist orientation is the most general thread running through the answers."
More than nine out of 10 critics believe government should make controlling sprawl a priority.
As for individual buildings, from a given list of structures, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building gathered the highest number of favorable responses. And while the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao didn't even make the top 10, Frank Gehry, its designer, topped the list of practicing architects (followed by Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava).
Best-read mags? Architecture, Metropolis and Architectural Record are the top three, with a newcomer, Dwell, coming in a surprising fourth. Landscape Architecture magazine, one of my must-reads, didn't make the survey's preconceived list.
Critics were drawn from the approximately 140 newspapers with daily circulations exceeding 75,000 as of June 30, 1999; the average daily circulation was 301,006.
Only about a fourth of the critics have degrees specific to the field of architecture, the survey found, but about half report having practical work experience in architecture or a related field. Of the 40, 33 have held other newspaper jobs, including arts reporter, city desk and the op-ed page.
The survey was distributed in the spring to 47 critics; some later were found to not qualify and others -- including critics from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal -- did not respond.
The full report is available on the National Arts Journalism Program's Web site, http://www.najp.org/.
Interview with an icon
Metropolis, by the way, this month features a lively interview with legendary interior space planner and designer Florence Knoll Bassett, who was responsible for bringing the furniture designs of Eero Saarinen, Mies van der Rohe and others into mass production.
Bassett, who last year donated her papers to the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, did Jack Heinz's black-and-white office suite here. Shown in both a photograph and a floor plan, it featured eight of Saarinen's executive office chairs, done in red, at a round table. Designed in 1957, the Saarinen chair has never been out of production -- one reason Bassett's rooms look as clean, lean and fresh today as they did in the 1940s and '50s.
Patricia Lowry is the Post-Gazette architecture critic. Her e-mail address is plowry@post-gazette.com.
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