Serious, thoughtful writing about architecture is an increasingly scarce commodity in this age of Instagram and the platform formerly known as Twitter and the decline of legacy media. But the people at New York Review of Architecture don’t seem to know that architecture criticism is supposed to be a thing of the past, because they’re publishing pages and pages of it, as if we were still in its golden age. It gives me hope that, while we may never go back to the days when The New York Times might run half a dozen pieces on architecture in a single week, there is at least a meaningful public discourse about what architecture can mean, and how it impacts our lives.
I’ve been subscribing to NYRA for four years, and am finding it ever more essential to my reading. The latest issue has not one but two reviews of the Paul Rudolph show at the Met, by Thomas de Monchaux and Mark Krotov; Samuel Medina sitting through both Megalopolis and The Brutalist so you don’t have to; a smart revisionist essay on Jane Jacobs by Andy Battle; and a lot more, including a bunch of shorter, more casual pieces that, if they weren’t scattered all through the issue, would be a kind of architectural version of The Talk of the Town in The New Yorker. In the previous issue I got to read Carolina Miranda on Iwan Baan and Sharon Zukin on Robert Moses. A lot of the pieces are by younger writers, who I love getting to know, in many cases for the first time in NYRA’s pages. And it’s in print, not just online, which may be a crazy thing to do today but which makes me admire NYRA all the more.
I still don’t like the backwards italics, but I’ll live with them. It is worth it to have NYRA putting architecture journalism and criticism once again front and center in New York, exactly where it belongs. I hope you will consider supporting this important publication, as I do.