architecture: cities, buildings, landscapes

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ARCHITECTURE

‘Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.’

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)




ANTWERP	CASTLES AND PALACES	BARCELONA - CASA MILA	LANDSCAPES

BARCELONA	HOUSES OF WORSHIP	THE HAGUE - SOCIETY DE WITTE

THE HAGUE	(DUTCH PAGES)	ROTTERDAM - THE SONNEVELD HOUSE

NIJMEGEN

Buildings are everywhere, large and small, ugly and beautiful, ambitious and dumb. We walk among them and live inside them, largely passive dwellers in cities of towers, houses, open spaces and shops we had no hand in creating. But we are their best audience. Owners, clients and residents come and go, but architecture lives on, acting a role in the life of the city and its citizens long after the original players are gone. We talk (in person, on blogs) about homes as investments, building sites as opportunities, unsold condominiums as an economic disaster, but all of that real-estate chatter sidesteps the physical reality of projects built and unbuilt. Rather than just talking about money, we should also be talking about height and bulk, style and sustainability, openness of architecture and of process. Design is not the icing on the cake but what makes architecture out of buildings, what turns them into places we want to live and eat and shop rather than avoid. Architecture critics can praise and pick on new designs, but their readership has lately been too limited. We need more critics — citizen critics — equipped with the desire and the vocabulary to remake the city.
There are times when city dwellers are roused from passivity; disaster (Ground Zero) and personal affront (NIMBYism) make protestors out of us all. But we are rarely roused by the day-to-day, brick-by-brick additions that have the most power to change our environment. We know what we already like but not how to describe it, or how to change it, or how to change our minds. We need to learn how to read a building, an urban plan, a developer’s rendering, and to see where critique might make a difference.

“How to Be an Architecture Critic” is excerpted from Alexandra Lange’s book, Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, published by Princeton Architectural Press.