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 2…