Dream Weaver

When I wrote about the figure of the knitting architect in February, little did I know that a panoply of knitted, woven and recycled work would soon be on display in New York ... all under the rubric of art, but definitely spatial and challenging. El Anatsui's sinuous works at the Brooklyn Museum, Orly Genger's Red, Yellow and Blue in Madison Square park, and, most modest in scale, the first New York show in 50 years of the work of midcentury sculptor Ruth Asawa, who wove forests, anemones and orbs out of metal wire.

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Anxiety, Culture and Commerce

In recent years, it has become a slam to say, of design collections and exhibitions, that they looked like a shop. When I take my son to the MoMA design collection, he looks in their glass fronted cases and sees the same Massimo Vignelli for Heller plates we have in our glass fronted cabinets at home. Should the difference be obvious? Or is the ability to experience design as a consumer how we spark an interest in history? A series of panels I've organized at MAD examines these questions in the past, present and future.

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Beyond Gorgeous

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of checking another famous modern house off my lifetime list: the J. Irwin and Xenia Miller House in Columbus, Indiana. Having studied the house for different projects over the past seven years, it did not surprise me in person. The colors and folksiness of Girard's work should never distract from his dazzling architecture, which makes everything look like a jewel, and organizes layers of material into coherence.

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Architecture Without Signs

I love graphic design. I understand the importance of way-finding systems. I own a label maker. I wish I had a color-coded closet. But architecture needs to work without words. The building should point your way to its entrance without an arrow. The visitor desk should not require a level change. If everyone is putting their feet on the wall, the bench is too close.

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What It Costs (to Buy a Bench, to Extend a Curb)

On Saturday afternoon, after dropping my son at a birthday party, I voted. For the first time in my experience it wasn't for a person, but for places, technology and trees. My City Council distrct has launched participatory budgeting, allowing community members to vote on how to spend $1 million in discretionary funds. Projects ranged in price from $350,000 for safety improvements to the fast-moving street at the end of my block, to $40,000 for new benches in Prospect Park. These homely numbers provided a reality check.

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Portlandia + Timelessness

Designer Frank Chimero posted a rant on his blog about "timeless" design. In a nutshell: what we call timeless today is a rough approximation of mainstream work in 1962, the work we see from that era looks good because time and taste have already separated the wheat from the chaff, and what's so great about "timeless" design anyway? Downtown Portland turns out to be an excellent place to explore the definition of timeless in architecture in 1947, 1970, 1982.

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Instagramming Around Australia

It's been quite a while since architecture made my jaw drop. But it did, literally, as I walked down Swanston Street in Melbourne ten days ago. There, in the space of a few blocks, is a collection of buildings so bright, so prickly, so merchanical, so textural that they create their own context. A set of slideshows of what I saw on my first (and, I hope, not last) trip to four of Australia's eastern cities.

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After the Museum: The Tumblr

This week marks the launch of metamuseum.tumblr.com, a Tumblr I edited for the Museum of Arts and Design’s spring series The Home Front: After the Museum. Each week features objects responding a single theme, from Alphabet to Year One, submitted by curators at American architecture, design, decorative arts and crafts collections. I saw it as a kind of curatorial game, Show Me What You’ve Got. I hope you'll play along.

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Founding Mother: Mariana Van Rensselaer and the Rise of Criticism

Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, though little known today, was not only a leading architecture critic of her day but also one of the pioneers of the field in the late 19th century. Here Alexandra Lange analyzes her writings and her influence. As she writes, "Mariana Van Rensselaer worked out the ground rules of the fledgling profession, struggling to be a critic of greater conscientiousness, while calling upon her players — architects, clients, public — to do their jobs properly."

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Patterns of Houston

Who is the best architecture critic of suburbia? Of no zoning? Do we have to patch together a new kind of criticism out of typologies of parking lots, Mike Davis on surveillance, a close reading of neighborhood covenants? Yes and no. First you have to look for the patterns.

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Why Bernadette Fox Is Scary

Angry, cut-off, not working, two houses on her resume. I started off Maria Semple's novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette thinking its heroine was a terrible vision of the female architect. But I ended up thinking Bernadette was indeed crazy like a fox. Is it only in novels that women architects can play by their own rules, and win?

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Balthazar Korab, RIP

Too often modern architectural photography is thought to be all alike. The covers of new monographs on Ezra Stoller and Balthazar Korab, who died last week at the age of 86, tell a different story. Both use images of Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal (1962). Stoller's image shows people on the move, the interior of the terminal a collage of light and dark. Korab, by contrast, shows a moment of repose. His foreground is filled with one of Saarinen's exquisite tiled curves, accentuated by a gradient of light and shadow.

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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.