As a longtime admirer of Christopher Hawthorne, I was honored by his thoughtful review of my book Building Culture (“Winging It,” NYRA #46/47). But the review contains one misconception that I’d like to push back on here, because it touches directly on the mission of NYRA by opening up broader questions about what architectural criticism is for.
“Rose flirts with the critical register,” Hawthorne writes, before concluding that I’m “generally supportive” of the decades-long expansionist trend in art museums that is one of the core subjects of the book. It’s easy to understand why Hawthorne doesn’t recognize my approach as critical, because his review opens with a parable establishing his own critical bona fides. Having spent much of his early career reviewing an apparently endless string of museum expansions, he became increasingly convinced that they brought out the worst in both architects and museums until he finally “threw up [his] hands and wrote a kind of protest essay” condemning the trend. I remember reading (and respecting) that piece; and this was back in 2007, when big city dailies still had architecture critics and stable subscriber numbers, so it’s possible that well over a million other people read it too. And yet, Hawthorne continues, “My essay had, as you might guess, no success.”
That kind of failure is exactly why we need new models of architectural criticism, models that combine historical and critical thinking and aim at explanation rather than condemnation. Museums offer case studies that can tell us a lot about architecture’s role in our society, good and bad. The decades-long museum boom is tied to big questions about everything from how technology is changing culture to how politics and economics are shaping urban development. The goal of my book was to help everyone involved—not just the architects who design these buildings, but the artists who show their work in them, the curators who run them, and the public who pays money to visit them—understand these dynamics and their own role in them. As Hawthorne says, the judgments have failed. Let’s try something else?