AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE TODAY lacks confidence. In the suburbs, mass-market brick and cheap plywood have given way to cheaper Hardie Board, every new house now eternally noncombustible. On campus, Brutalist citadels from the golden ages of architecture and academia get swapped out for athletic buildings at once ostentatious and desperate for validation, like the tax cheats whose names have been affixed to their façades. In the cities, massive voids carved out by decades of racism, greed, and mismanagement belatedly get filled by structures that seem ignorant of basic spatial logic—the best new infill housing, which we have no choice but to build, is more tentative and clumsy than the worst 1970s parking garage, which should never have been built in the first place. And everywhere we look, cut-rate sub-Costco warehouses are going up with shocking speed, temporary in their appear…
Some Like It Not
The kindest thing that can be said about the worst building Norman Foster has ever designed is that it meets and exceeds its moment.
