Making Criticism More Critical

摘要

In architecture school, I went to Amenia, New York, to see Lewis Mumford, then the gray eminence of criticism in our field. I asked him how to become an architectural critic, and he responded patiently to the chutzpah of my ques-tian with the counsel that a critic of architecture must know about many more things than just buiftings. He talked about his disappointment that architects had largely forsaken our role as public intellectuals after World War II, a role that he saw as an essential part of our profession, and he later wrote a reading list for me, which included healthy doses of Plato, Thoreau, and Emerson. With his advice in mind, I went to graduate school in intellectual history, where I focused on Mumford and his critics, and to the "great books" program at St. John's College, whose curriculum came the closest to Mumford's reading list. That one meeting and the subsequent correspondence I had with him changed my life. Mumford's form of criticism, aimed at a broad readership, has become less common, evident in the shrinking number of critics writing for newspapers and general-circulation magazines, but his approach deserves another look. Most of the criticism in our field falls into two camps. In one camp lies the narrowly utilitarian or blatantly promotional writing about architecture that we often find in the professional magazines and firm-sponsored monographs, and in the other camp lies the overly obscure or abjectly arcane writing that we sometimes find in the academic journals and books of architectural theory.