Alan persuaded me to come here today by telling me I could talk about a subject I know fairly well: myself, Or, more accurately, me as the Philadelphia Inquirer’s architecture critic. He seems to think there is a lot of mystery about how architecture critics operate. So, at the risk of making my methods too transparent, I will try to draw away the curtain - to reveal how I see the role of an architecture critic, working for a general interest, mass circulation daily newspaper published in an old, recovering, heavily blue-collar, rustbelt city.

First things first. There are two questions that I am inevitably asked at gatherings of this sort. The first one is: Am I an architect. The other is: What is my favorite building. I figure I should get those questions out of the way now.

The answer to the first is: No: I am not an architect. I’m an architecture critic. The big give away is that I am not wearing funny eyeglasses. My view is that the two professions have absolutely nothing in common except that they both involve buildings.

Second. I’m sorry, I don’t have a favorite building.  I can’t begin to tell you how much I detest this question. It’s a lot like asking a parent to pick her favorite child. I am fond of many buildings. I’m even fonder of ensembles of buildings. And I consider myself ecumenical in my tastes.

There is another reason I dislike this question. It diminishes the very enterprise of being a critic. Anyone can say: I like this – I don’t like that. If you’ve ever read the comments on my blog, you know there are no shortage of people willing to offer off-the-cuff opinions. They often remind me of Siskel and Ebert. It’s thumbs up or thumbs down. What an architecture critic must do, if she has any hope of a regular paycheck, is make a systematic case for why a building or public space or a plan might be good, bad or merely interesting, and express that case in an entertaining, informative, independent and relevant way.

So, if I’m not an architect, what gives me the right to be spouting off every Friday in 350,000 copies of the Inquirer? Nothing and no one, except, perhaps, Brian Tierney. Other than a certain level of journalistic skill –the ability to ask nosey questions and write coherent prose - there are no standard job requirements for being an architecture critic, just as there are none for any other reporting specialties.  That sometimes shocks non-journalists. Keep in mind that we are a nation run by ordinary citizens.

Actually I consider my whole life as preparation for the job – growing up in Levittown, New York – the old original Levittown, that is - studying history and literature at NYU and Penn, Nine years as a local reporter in New Jersey, covering countless planning board, town council and sewer authority meetings. Eight years as a student and then foreign correspondent in Dublin, Paris, Belgrade and Moscow. Covering two immensely destructive wars and seeing a lot of beautiful, historic structures blown to bits. Having seen a bit of the world gives me perspective for evaluating what happens in Philadelphia.

Not only is there is no set career path for becoming an architecture critic, there are only about 20 full-time, non-academic critics in the country. And our number is shrinking, in tandem with American newspapers, despite what I believe is a growing popular interest in architecture. When we critics have our conventions, we hold them in a room smaller than this. I would say there are no two of us in that room who do the job in precisely the same way. That’s because a critic’s home city exerts a powerful influence on – dictates might be a better word – the critic’s themes. The city makes the critic and a good critic reflects the city.

My own experience is instructive. When I first started as architecture critic in 1999, the Inquirer arts editor - an reconstructed New Yorker - expected would I would approach the subject a little like a foreign correspondent. I’d travel around and write articles about sexy new buildings designed by famous architects, critiquing them as stand-alone art objects. It was expected that I would also write about new buildings in Philadelphia, but only those that qualified architecture with a capital A.

The problem of course is that in 1999, there were almost no new buildings going up in Philadelphia that remotely qualified. In fact, the only significant new structures at that time, it seemed, were parking garages. The other major trend in Philadelphia was the accelerated demolition of the city’s fabric as a result of years of neglect, speculation, cronyism, public ignorance and urban self-loathing.

It soon became evident  that there was no point in rushing off to LA or London to write about the latest, cool building, or chronicling the currents in architectural theory. The stories that most engaged me were the ones about fairly ordinary structures, streetscapes and public spaces. My audience was especially interested in the politics and policy that were shaping the built world they encountered every day. And why not. The Inquirer’s readers are not architects or planners. They’re civilians. What they know about architecture is what they see before their own eyes, day after day. The needs of Philadelphia forced me to expand the definition of architecture critic to include topics not generally covered by most of the nation’s critics: pay to play, zoning reform, parking policy, historic preservation, blank walls, waterless urinals.

I should point out here that the role of the architecture critic is unlike that of the other culture critics - the movie, art, book and music reviewers. Those critics essentially act as consumer guides, giving advice on how you should spend your money. I’m not going to save you any money. And if you’re a developer or design professional, what I write might even cost you some bucks. The other key difference is that engagement with those other art forms is voluntary. Nobody forces you to see the Cezanne blockbuster at the art museum. But anyone  who spends any time in Center City is eventually going to have to make eye contact with Symphony House. Architecture is both public art and public policy, and that places special demands on the critic.  

I divide critics into two types: the markmakers and nestmakers. The markmakers tend to be interested  in whether a new building distinguishes itself against the competition and leaves a personal stamp on the earth. Nestmakers are more concerned with making sure everyone is comfortable. Please don’t ask me if this is a gender thing.

The critics at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are clearly in the markmaker category. They work at bigger papers with more thorough city coverage than the Inquirer. The readership of those papers is overall more worldly in its tastes. That gives those critics the freedom to think about architecture almost exclusively as an art form and to pitch their columns to an informed niche audience. They can leave the politics of building to the city reporters. As a critic in Philadelphia at this moment in history, with the type of government we have in this city and state, I feel I don’t have that luxury. I’m happy to say, however, that since I started down this road Philadelphia has seen a lot more buildings with ambition, some of them even quite good. But I still consider it my responsibility to chronicle the less visible changes to Philadelphia’s built environment – sidewalks for example.

Incidentally, you might be interested to learn that the stories that have generated the most response in the last few years:  my review of Citizens Bank park, my stories about the plumbers union’s resistance to waterless urinals in the Comcast tower, and my Delaware waterfront pieces. A story I wrote last year about Ben Van Berkel’s Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart, which recently won a prestigious journalism prize, generated not a single email or phone call. Alas.

I don’t want you to think my column topics are skewed entirely toward crowd pleasers. I’m well aware that columns about planning, politics or urban issues will generate twice the email of a more aesthetically oriented piece. But I nevertheless try to alternate between the two, one week planning, the next aesthetics. I believe that a critic’s job is to educate readers about quality design and advocate for the art in architecture. Most people aren’t reading Architectural Record or Metropolis. The only way they’re going to develop their architectural taste is from seeing good design discussed in the mass media. I also try mix it up geographically. One week Center City, the next an outer neighborhood, the week after, a suburban location. It’s not always easy to find the right candidate. If you notice, the columns are tied into something topical, ideally something that will happen (as opposed to something that has already happened.) The topic choices are always my own.

So is my point of view. One of the wonderful things about being a staff writer for the Inquirer is that I don’t have to answer to any interest  group other than my readers. I don’t have to couch things so diplomatically they become meaningless because I am not a participant. I am forever an outsider. Even the most civic-minded groups, like DAG, the Preservation Alliance, neighborhood groups, have to maintain relationships with officials and politicians. I don’t.  I might often be wrong-headed, but I like to think I come by my wrong-headeness honestly.

Not everyone appreciates this aspect of journalism. Not long ago I got a call from a developer who wanted to help patch things up with a certain zoning board member I had criticized.  The developer’s view of the situation was classic Philadelphia: You two should be friends. I had to explain to him that making friends is not the purpose of what I do. In fact, I like having enemies.

Similarly, a comment on my blog last week also showed a misunderstanding of the critic’s job. I had written a post about Bob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, in which I praised their historic contributions to architecture. The reader complained that I should stop saying nice things about them since most Philadelphians don’t like their buildings. (It’s true – they don’t.) There are many ways to approach the critic’s job, but none involve echoing or validating the public consensus.  A critic has to follow Thoreau’s advice about the Majority of One, no matter how many people write to the letters pages to complain.

Yet, being a Majority of One often means accepting your losses. I criticized what I considered very serious design flaws in both the convention center and the National Jewish Museum, and nothing has changed. I don’t consider that a failed effort, however, because I don’t believe a critic’s work is about just one building. A critic’s most important job is to provide the information, the language, the point of view and the understanding so that the public can participate in the shaping their built environment.

Architecture criticism is part of an ongoing narrative about how we construct our society. A single review might be ignored, but the conversation goes on. The ideas that have value gain currency over time. Five years ago, when Mayor Street announced his misguided developer search for Penn’s Landing, who could have imagined that today Philadelphia would be undertaking a waterfront master plan.

Ada Louise Huxtable, a hero of mine, once wrote that critics shouldn’t be seen as prophets handing down the word of god. Lord knows we’re fallible and often wrong. We’re just people with strong ideas that we try to persuade others to adopt. If we occasionally manage to turn a reader into a civilian architecture critic, that’s a good day’s work.