Leading architecture and design critics ponder the future of their profession.

A feature spread from the November, 1985 issue of Metropolis

Thirty years after Metropolis's first critics round table, today's influential voices weigh in on their role, and the future of criticism in the digital age.

Oliver Wainwright is an architecture critic at the Guardian.

To reclaim its relevance, design criticism must break free from the navel-gazing circus of design weeks and biennales, salones and triennales, and focus on the real world around us. It must be proactive and provocative, not passive and responsive, seeking out stories rather than following the lead of the PR sales pitch. Design doesn’t happen in the hermetic tents of trade fairs and product launches, but in hospitals and schools, subways and sewers, places where the marketing machines won’t deign to tread. Critics must escape from the glossy silos of the arts and style sections, because design is not a lifestyle commodity—it’s the fundamental stuff of everyday life.

Michael Abrahamson is architectural historian at the University of Michigan and editor of Fuck Yeah Brutalism.

Over the past tumultuous decade, design criticism has shown itself to be robust and resilient enough to withstand the tremors of an ever-shifting media landscape. While traditional print outlets have made many missteps in their ongoing transition to the web, critics themselves have adapted more readily, creating new formats and functions for their writing and activism. Innumerable crises declared and eulogies read have, it seems, been premature or overstated.

The state of design criticism remains strong. That being said, we have also begun to recognize some of the limitations of design discourse on the web. Maintaining a ridiculous and unsustainable pace, many of the behemoths of online publishing have displayed a regrettable tendency to reprint or merely rephrase press releases distributed by design offices and product manufacturers rather than taking the time to assess or engage with design in any meaningful way. Instead of attempting to aggregate every interesting project that comes our way or filling column inches by wishing an annual happy birthday to all “starchitects” living and dead, we must find a way to make sense of the perpetual flood of content instead of trying to consume it all. This will require time and careful thought, two things that are unfortunately in short supply.

Justin Davidson is architecture critic at New York Magazine.

Being a critic today means having a light grip on the joystick. One moment you’re closing in on a story you’ve been tracking for months, and the next you’re picking off a news item to post online in 15 minutes or less. You keep one eye on exquisitely detailed luxury design, another on planning at the urban scale, and try not to lose sight of everything in between. Ideally, you’re fluent in the history of rent control, financing mechanisms for transit projects, traffic-calming techniques, advances in concrete technology, flood management, sustainable design, and a score of other wonky subspecialties.
In other words, it’s a job nobody can really do justice to. So we do our homework, stumble toward a point of view, and try to remember that critics are people, too—end-point users of buildings, products, infrastructure, and cities, just like everybody else. And, also like everybody else, we’ve got a right to our opinions. Our claim to a paycheck is that we (hopefully) put in the labor to justify those reactions, and spend time converting them into prose that readers want to read, thereby encouraging others to join what might otherwise be a pretty hermetic conversation. The more voices who compete with ours, and the more vigorously they argue, the more successful we can claim to be. (I hope it doesn’t happen too often, but I take a certain pride in the phone call from an incensed reader who announced that she was going to cancel her subscription, so outraged was she by a judgment I’d expressed in print.) What’s missing from this creative cacophony, thank goodness, is a tone of Olympian authority or impermeable ideology. We lack blinkered oracles, and instead content ourselves with civilized, if somewhat chaotic, conversation among people who care about an ever-lengthening list of topics. It’s a privilege to participate.

Alexandra Lange is opinion columnist at Dezeen.

What’s missing from the discourse? Money. We have more voices, with more distribution, writing criticism than ever before, but they are being paid less. This makes it difficult to consider the sweep of an architect’s career, to do in-depth reporting, even, increasingly, to visit projects at all. The building review is starting to disappear, replaced by a portfolio of images paid for by the architect. Critics ponder reception, reputation, rants, but not the built work that’s the foundation of practice. Critics promote better discourse but not necessarily better buildings. It’s interesting that money is at the bottom of architecture’s present-day problems too—we can’t have a more diverse profession unless architects start being compensated properly for their time, stop doing poorly paid competitions, and push back against the insane hours. Same goes for criticism: Who can afford to do it? Who can take the time to think and look, when another $250 blog post, written off someone else’s reporting, is forever due? That the quality is as high as it is, is a testament to criticism as a vocation, not as an ongoing profession....Continue Redaing

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