The Well-Tempered Environment

What I was looking for in Dallas and Fort Worth was connective tissue, the landscape architecture that ties buildings together in a district and makes a downtown into a place you want to stroll. In Texas, that's not possible without water and old trees (or their high-tech shading equivalents). Food trucks help, too, to turn an opera house lawn into a midday destination.

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The Mother of Us All

Reyner Banham wasn't cowed by many, but even he was nervous about meeting Esther McCoy. As Banham wrote, "Until about 1960, the rest of the world had practically no idea at all about architecture in California... Then this extraordinary book came out in 1960, and — suddenly — California architecture had heroes, history, and character." A new book of McCoy's writings has just been published, and you should get it.

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Against Kickstarter Urbanism

Kickstarter is not a popularity contest, or a democracy. Kickstarter’s founders select which projects go on the blog. Their declaration of a glorious new era for design suggests that projects that aren’t Kickstarter worthy aren’t worthy. A suitable funding platform for a watch is not a suitable funding platform for a city.

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Fixing South Street Seaport: Is New Architecture Enough?

Howard Hughes International would like to replace Ben Thompson's Pier 17 at South Street Seaport with an elegant SHoP Architects-designed glass box. In a New York Times CityRoom post last week, longtime real estate reporter David Dunlap asked, “Does Pier 17 Deserve Another Chance?” I think it does.

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Carlo Scarpa, Quilter

St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice approaches architecture and decoration like a crazy quilt, confident that all good things go together. Architect Carlo Scarpa, in the 1950s, managed to make a different kind of loot look modern.

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Frank Lloyd Wright + Katniss Everdeen

Architecture is everywhere: on Pedro E. Guerrero, photographer of Wright, Breuer and Calder and the buildings, weapons and fashion of box office smash The Hunger Games.

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'Deco Japan' + Designing Women

A dancer in a liquid, backless dress stares at herself in a horizontal mirror, feet resting on a black square of a checkerboard floor. Also reflected in the mirror: the curving tubular steel of a cantilever chair, its seat daringly upholstered in a tiger stripe. Where are we?

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City of Shoes: Is Urbanism Scalable?

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is looking to create happiness in downtown Las Vegas, betting that urbanism and walkability are the way forward for his company and the city it calls home. But are creating incubator spaces and curating retail analogous to selling shoes?

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How to Be an Architecture Critic

We’re surrounded by buildings, says Alexandra Lange, but we don’t know how to talk about them. We chat about real estate instead of having a real conversation about the urban environment. As architecture criticism fades in the daily newspapers, it’s time we take matters into our own hands: “We need more citizen critics,” she writes, “equipped with the desire and the vocabulary to remake the city.” So how do we learn how to talk about buildings? Lange suggests starting with “Sometimes We Do It Right,” Ada Louise Huxtable's classic review of the Marine Midland Bank Building in New York.

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Reassembling the American Dream

The Museum of Modern Art's new exhibition "Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream" asks what people really like about suburban living. And then, Can they do that with less?

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Downton Abbey: Fell In Love With a House

As in Jane Austen, from whose Pride and Prejudice the Matthew-Lady Mary relationship initially seemed remixed, behind every love match is the question of property. Downton Abbey, for all its melodrama and dropped teacups, is really the story of falling in love with a house.

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Round Thermostats and Crystal Lanterns, Revisited

While the tech blogs have a knee-jerk affinity for Apple, I have a knee-jerk affinity for the industrial design greats of old. I couldn't believe that Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, wrote as if Apple were the first computer company to have a design program. There's no reason to be so snotty about old tricks.

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Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic, and author of Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities. (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in The Architect's Newspaper, Architectural Record, Dwell, Metropolis, Print, New York Magazine and The New York Times.

Recent Book

Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities
Alexandra Lange
Princeton Architectural Press, 2012
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Design Matters Interview

Alexandra Lange and Jane Thompson

In this podcast interview with Debbie Millman, Alexandra Lange and Jane Thompson discuss their new book, the store Design Research, creating the power of imagination, Marimekko, Sir Lady Jane and Benjamin Thompson.