Escaping Judgment Mode

“How do we get beyond judgment mode?” Speaking to a small and engaged lunchtime zoom audience gathered by architectural writer and curator Owen Hopkins of the Farrell Centre last Thursday as a part of their Towards Another Architecture series, critic Marianela D’Aprile (with whom I work at NYRA) rebutted a hot take by New York Magazine’s senior art critic Jerry Saltz, about holding Nuremberg Trials for architects. In its place, she offered her own hot take on the state of architecture, saying: “I don’t think architecture critics can stop bad buildings, especially after they are made.”

D’Aprile posited that there are two main modes of critique today: (1) Rewriting the press release, and (2) judgment. Of the two, she argued, judgment mode is not appropriate for architecture. Unlike, say, films or books, people have very little choice about which architecture they consume, “I am in my apartment right now because I live here, not because I like the architecture.”

The argument picked up a line of reasoning D’Aprile has advanced before: that buildings are products of forces much more fundamental than the architect’s pen (or the critic’s opinion), namely capital and the way we organize society. Therefore she advocated that architecture critics look at buildings as something that people interact with incidentally as part of their everyday life, with the implication being that critics look at the whole system, that is, everyday life, in order to critique a building. In short, Saltz’s Hudson Yards Nuremberg trials are “going to take in a lot more people than just architecture critics…”