If Julian Rose operated, in the pages of Building Culture or anywhere else, as some kind of design-world Isaac Chotiner, using the interview format to hold famous architects and their powerful museum clients to account—or at the very least, since this is not world hunger or armed conflict we’re talking about, to risk making them feel even briefly uncomfortable—I might be willing to entertain the idea that what he’s up to deserves to be included on a list of “new models of architectural criticism.” But even readers impressed by elements of the book, as I certainly was, would be hard-pressed to defend it in the aggregate as much more than a highly literate promotional vehicle for the architecture-museum industrial complex. Time and again Rose has a chance to press his subjects meaningfully on some crucial if delicate subject—the wisdom of gratuitous and seemingly endless expansion and the price museumgoers pay for it (see Barnes Foundation, The); the role the art world plays in whitewashing ill-gotten fortunes and dodgy reputations (the Sacklers and David Koch at the Met, just for starters); the working conditions of museum construction crews (Saadiyat Island); and the tendency of architects, especially egregious with this building type in particular, to coast on past glories (half the interviewees in the book)—and time and again he lets the moment pass. If this is the “something else” we’re meant to try, I’ll keep looking.
—Christopher Hawthorne, New Haven