Architecture as culture, not art

Last week, I wrote that “I’d like architecture critics to write about a building’s influence on the street as much as they write about the ‘chiseled setbacks and crisp vertical lines’” beloved by Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. Well, the Post’s Philip Kennicott did just that, in a very pro-urbanism piece praising the new convention center’s proposed pedestrian alley for its “ability to draw people in.”

“In Washington, there are people who wander the streets looking for things that feel like a city,” he wrote. “And what is a city? … People, motion, business, crowds and chance encounters.”

Absolutely. This is what architecture is about, not art. This is the way journalists should cover architecture, based on what “feels like a city.” Oh, and architect Philip Johnson, centerpiece of that Architecture as Art exhibit? Kennicott is not a fan, calling it “sheer staginess and theatricality,” and “nakedly about the power of the architect to impose his ideas on a place… You feel great relief that much of this diminished architecture [of his later work] was never built.”

Maybe we ought to be giving the architecture columns to more culture critics and fewer architects.