Todd Longstaffe Gowan, Instructor for the Historical Landscapes and Gardens Section of the London MA Program

Movie Night, April 3rd

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Event Today

Professor Shelley Rice is “Invited Bloggist” for the magazine of the Jeu de Paume Museum, Paris

While I was visiting Paris in January, Marta Gili, Director of the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, asked me if I would consider being the “Invited Bloggist” for the Museum’s online magazine. A new feature, the “Blog Invité” is a six-month guest position, so I will continue publishing commentaries, reviews, interviews etc. until September 2012. The magazine’s editors were interested in me precisely because I had a history of writing newspaper columns and reviews for magazines like Artforum and Art in America during the heyday of New York’s Downtown Scene during the 1970s and 1980s. For my part, as you will see if you read the “About Me” page, I was fascinated by the idea of being a journalist during this very different digital age, a time when my audience will no longer be the people in the ‘hood but the global public for contemporary photography and art. Interestingly enough, when I offered to write the Blog in French the museum decided it would help their outreach more if they changed languages temporarily, so they could communicate with an expanded group of people — like my NYU students.

Shelley Rice

Urban Design in London

Alumni News, Spring 2012

Hearty thanks to all of the Art History, Urban Design, and Historical and Sustainable Architecture alumni who responded to our recent call for news.  It is wonderful to hear from you and to learn about your activities and achievements. We hope to hear from more of you for our next “alumni news” round-up, which will occur in Fall 2012. Please send your news, links, photos, videos and podcasts to Professor Kathryn Smith (kathryn.smith@nyu.edu) with a copy to Peggy Coon (peggy@nyu.edu), and thank you.

 Gabriel P. Weisberg (Art History, Fine Arts Department, Washington Square College, ’63), was named the recipient of the 2012 Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award by the College Art Association.  The Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award, established in 1977, is presented to an individual who has been actively engaged in teaching art history for most of his or her career. Among the range of criteria that may be applied in evaluating candidates are: inspiration to a broad range of students in the pursuit of humanistic studies; rigorous intellectual standards and outstanding success in both scholarly and class presentation; contribution to the advancement of knowledge and methodology in the discipline, including integration of art-historical knowledge with other disciplines; and aid to students in the development of their careers. In being honored in this way, Professor Weisberg joins a distinguished list of past winners of this award, including Horst W. Janson (1979) — former chair of the Department of Fine Arts, New York University — Meyer Shapiro (1981), Oleg Grabar (1983), Marvin Eisenberg (1987), James Ackerman (1991), Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann (1992), Jules Prown (1996), Cecilia F. Klein (2000), current Department of Art History professor Carol Krinsky (2004), and Wu Hung (2008).  For more information about Professor Weisberg and the award, go to http://www.collegeart.org/awards/2012awards.

Erin Donnelly (Art History, ’94; M. A. Gallatin, and Certificate in Museum Studies, GSAS, ‘03) is Internships and Grants Administrator, Department of Art & Art Professions, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at NYU and brings her wealth of experience working with artists in the non-profit arts sector to working with faculty and students.  From 2001, she worked for Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) in a variety of positions, including Director, Artist Residencies.  She recently served as adjunct faculty and administrator in the Department of Photography & Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts.  Her specialization in artist services and professional development has led to her participation with The Cue Art Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New York Public Library and lectures at universities including Bennington College, Cleveland Art Institute, and Columbia University, among others.  She has a curatorial background as well, and has organized exhibitions and public art in New York City, Peekskill, NY and Vienna, Austria over the past ten years.  Her publications include “Art in Odd Places: Sign” and “Site Matters.”  She is a mentor for the Richard and Mica Hadar Foundation and serves on the board of free103point9, a new media arts organization. Erin was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in 2001. She was the recipient of the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts David Alfaro Siqueiros Award for professional excellence.

Kathryn Gettles-Atwa (B.A. Art History, ‘94; M.A. Institute of Fine Arts, ‘97) was promoted to counsel in the Corporate Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, among the most prestigious law firms in the United States. Her practice focuses on the securities law aspects of corporate finance, and she has advised a wide range of clients on their initial public offerings, public and private debt and equity offerings, exchange offers, tender offers, ongoing reporting requirements, and other issues related to securities law matters, including those pertaining to mergers and acquisitions and other corporate takeovers.  Ms. Gettles-Atwa has a particular concentration in private equity firms and their portfolio companies.

Baylor Lancaster (B.A. Art History, ’96; M.B.A. Stern, ’00) Baylor Lancaster announces with joy the birth of her first child, a daughter, with Larry Samuel. Freya Pierce Samuel was born on January 26th, 2012, weighing 8 lbs 13 oz, at Baptist Hospital in Miami, Florida. Baby, mom, and dad are all doing great! Baylor is currently enjoying her maternity leave before returning to work as a research analyst covering the banking industry at CreditSights. In her spare time, Baylor is pursuing an M.A. in Liberal Studies at the University of Miami, with a focus on art history/visual studies.

Freya Pierce Samuel — asleep at home

 

Catherine McNeur (Urban Design, ’03) earned her Ph.D. from Yale University in Urban History, writing a doctoral dissertation on “The ‘Swinish Multitude’ and Fashionable Promenades: Battles over Public Space in New York City, 1815-1865.”  As McNeur puts it, her dissertation “traces the fluid boundaries between city and country by studying the social and political battles that helped to establish those distinctions. Nineteenth-century New York City suffered from a paradox of progress. The reforms that helped to make the city more “urban” and livable led to a diminishment in the poor’s power to use public spaces as they needed to make ends meet.  Progress, in short, entailed the decline of the urban commons.  I focus on how the city’s parks and streets served as a battleground for economic classes, ethnic and racial groups, and a growing city government.  Through stories about free-roaming animals, the development of parks, the recycling of urban food waste and manure, public health crises, and the growth of shantytowns, I show how changes to environmental systems affected the lives and livelihoods of many New Yorkers.” Dr. McNeur has published an article that grows out of her dissertation, titled “The ‘Swinish Multitude”:  Controversies over Hogs in Antebellum New York City,” in the Journal of Urban History (September 2011).  She is the author of entries in the second edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City and reviews in Common-Place, Enterprise and Society, and Louisiana History.  She has presented her work at the annual conferences of the Organization of American Historians and the American Society of Environmental History, as well as the Conference on Environmental History at Yale University and the Draper Graduate Student Conference on Early American Studies.

Lydia Mattice Brandt (Art History, ’04) earned a Ph.D. in art and architectural history from the University of Virginia in May 2011.  She began an Assistant Professor position at the University of South Carolina in the fall of 2011, teaching architectural history and American art.  Her research focuses on the Colonial Revival in American architecture and material culture.  “If you see a building modeled after George Washington’s Mount Vernon, pass it along!”, urges Lydia.

After graduating from NYU, Emily Leonardo (Art History, ’07) worked for four years for Agnes Gund, President Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art.  She is currently an Administrative Assistant in the Department of Drawing and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum, where she has worked since September 2011.  She is also completing her M.A. in Art History at Hunter College.  Formerly a Renaissance specialist as an undergraduate, Emily now focuses on religious art of twentieth-century Europe, and specifically, church decoration of postwar France.  Her thesis, entitled “‘The Vulgar Symbol’: Bonnard, Léger and Matisse at Assy,” examines the iconography of three works commissioned for the Dominican church of Notre Dame de Toute Grâce, Assy.  She will speak about the Dominican revival of sacred art with regard to Fernand Léger’s mosaic of The Virgin of the Litany at an upcoming conference on Icons at SUNY Binghamton next month.

 Shannon Vittoria (Art History / French, ‘07) is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Art History at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center under the supervision of Patricia Mainardi.  She specializes in nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture, with a focus on issues of gender in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.  She has given several papers at graduate and professional conferences, including a recent symposium at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (May 2011), as well as at the CUNY Graduate Center, SUNY Binghamton, and the 2010 and 2011 Mid-Atlantic/Popular American Culture Association’s annual conferences.  After graduating from NYU, she worked for a number of museums and galleries, including the Guggenheim and the Pace Gallery.  She is currently a curatorial research assistant at the Frick Collection and an Adjunct Professor at Kingsborough Community College, where she is teaching an introductory art history course.

Sara Allain-Botsford (Art History, ’09) is currently living in Paris and teaching English with the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF).  She is interested in European languages and is improving her proficiency in French.  After graduating from NYU she attended University of California, Berkeley, where she completed a certificate to Teach English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). While completing her coursework, she worked as an intern with the Museum Ambassador Program at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) and also as a substitute teacher.  Before moving to Paris in October 2010, she worked at the Zentner Collection, managing the listing and cataloguing of the collection online.  In 2010, she contributed to the re-starting of the NYU San Francisco Bay Area alumni club.

 Perrin Lathrop (Art History, ‘09) earned an M.A. in the History of Art at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art in 2011. Focusing on political issues surrounding the presentation and reception of global contemporary art with Dr. Julian Stallabrass, Perrin took a particular interest in contemporary African artistic production and the development of cultural institutions on the African continent over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She will present her distinction-awarded dissertation, “Localizing the Global Biennial? The Encounters of Bamako, African Biennial of Photography, 1994-2011,” at the 2012 Rutgers University Art History Graduate Symposium entitled The Art of Travel. Perrin continues to pursue her study of African art, both historical and contemporary, in the professional realm with her appointment as Research Assistant to Christa Clarke, Curator of the Arts of Africa at the Newark Museum. Perrin also recently became a contributing writer to the New York-based website Art Observed.

In 2011, Elliot Richman (Art History, ’09) curated his first exhibition, Picasso: Important Works on Paper at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  He also wrote and designed the exhibition catalog.  At present, he is living in Jerusalem and working for an Israel Education and Advocacy Organization called Stand With Us.  As Elliot reports, “I live with a family that abides by the Tanach and follows the Ten Commandments, so you can imagine the interesting conversations we’ve had about images and image-making, which is forbidden.”

Elliot Richman at Picasso Opening

Ksenia Yachmetz (Art History, ’09) is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  There, she is a Dodge Fellow, holding a Graduate Curatorial Assistantship in the Nancy and Norton Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum. Last fall, she was appointed Administrator of The Malevich Society, an academic organization established for the pursuit and promotion of scholarship on the Russian avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich.  On January 14, 2012, Ksenia was married to her fiancé Bruno Nouril in a ceremony at St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in the East Village, which was followed by a reception at The University Club.

Recently, Elinor Rubin (B.A. Urban Design, ’10; M.A. Historical and Sustainable Architecture ’11) took up a full-time position as gallery manager at The Skyscraper Museum in Battery Park City, New York.  She will oversee all aspects of the Museum’s day-to-day operations, including its important fundraisers.  As Eli puts it, the position “will be a really great way to really learn and understand how non-profits function and operate–especially those involved in the arts.”

Emily Moore (Urban Design ’12) writes, “I landed a great job at an architecture firm. After I graduated in January I began working here full time, but I had been interning since August. I wanted to share with my fellow Urban Design and Architecture Studies classmates because I know how discouraging it can be to come out of NYU with an art history background, an interest in architecture, and nowhere to go.”  In addition to her Urban Design coursework, Emily took advantage of the NYUSCPS AutoCAD course and studied at Parsons this past summer, where she learned “a little about design and a little about computer programs.” She is now working at SPaN, an award-winning firm that uses Vectorworks.  As Emily puts it, “All of those things put me in a great position to be successful here, and now I am drawing construction documents as well as designing small elements within the projects.”

Post from The Grey Art Gallery Blog, The Grey Area, Written by DAH Student Rooni Lee

On Performing in Larry Miller’s Flux-Tour at the Grey

Having always considered myself an introvert, I never thought that I would “perform” at an art event. However, on November 11, 2011, at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, I performed in front of fifty people as a part of Larry Miller’s famous Flux-Tour.

Even harder to believe, Larry Miller led the tour—the Larry Miller, who actually first invented and conducted the Flux-Tours back in the late 1970s! Some background on Flux-Tours; they were guided by artists, such as George Brecht and Alison Knowles, who brought groups to various art-related places in New York City, and talked about everything but the art, as if the venue itself were a work of art. Flux-Tours challenged conventional definitions of art and demonstrated that anything can be seen as art. So, in conjunction with the exhibitions Fluxus and the Essential Question of Life and Fluxus at NYU: Before and Beyond (which were on view at the Grey last fall, September 9–December 3, 2011), Larry Miller reprised his work of the ’70s.

Larry Miller, Prop for performance by Rooni Lee in Flux-Tour, Grey Art Gallery, NYU, November 11, 2011

I was one of his four assistants, who volunteered to find “anomalies” for him to talk about, count the flutes on the Grey’s columns, and collect dirt from various places in the gallery. Miller invited each assistant to perform a brief presentation about some of the objects. Knowing of my Korean descent, Miller asked me to talk in the Korean language about the objects around Zen for TV (1963/78) and Zen for Film (1964) by Nam June Paik (1931–2006).

Yes, in Korean. It made such sense, since it highlights the international aspect of Fluxus, as well as the ironic nature of the Flux-Tour. I felt very excited about talking to a mostly English-speaking audience in my mother tongue, which is something I had not done since coming to the United States.

On the day of the tour, the three minutes dedicated to my performance was a life-changing moment for me. Having more than fifty people in front of me—including the artist himself—whose attention was focused solely on what I was doing, gave me an adrenaline rush. I wasn’t even aware of how loudly I was speaking about the electric cords that are connected to Zen for TV, and how exaggerated my gestures were in explaining the spinning of the projector of Zen for Film. I was no longer a quiet Asian girl, but a confident young woman in an extra-large painter’s coverall and white gloves, enthusiastically engaged in an art performance!

I was very engaged with the audience too. I felt the mutual trust between us. I fully believed that they would understand what I was talking about, and they knew that I wasn’t talking nonsense in a language they did not understand. Trust filled the air between us, and everything just made sense.

In the end, I learned three important things from the Flux-Tour. First is the confidence I never knew I had. Second is a lesson about communication through art. Cultural background, age, and even language do not matter when people communicate through art. Last but not least is the hat Miller’s wife made for the assistants, which had the Flux-Tour logo on it—with Larry’s autograph! It is now stored safely in my little box with stuff like the dog collar of my first puppy, and a ring I inherited from my grandmother.

–Written by Rooni Lee, NYU CAS ’12 and Undergraduate Intern, Grey Art Gallery

Post from The Grey Art Gallery Blog, The Grey Area, Written by DAH Student Carolyn Keogh

Visiting American Vanguards at the Neuberger Museum of Art

John Graham, Tabletop Still Life with Bird, 1929. Oil on canvas, 32 in. x 39 in. Collection of Tommy and Gill Lipuma, New York

Dear readers, I have a sincere request: Please support your local university art museums! If sometimes you forget to visit these wonderful places, American Vanguards, currently on view at Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum of Art, serves as a pleasant reminder as to why these important art institutions should not be neglected.

During a recent trip to Westchester, I made a pit-stop in Purchase to see the show and was delighted by the display of abstract art from the 1930’s and ’40s. The exhibition is organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art (located on the campus of Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts) and curated by William C. Agee, Irving Sandler, and Karen Wilkin. American Vanguards is on view through April 29 (when it travels to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas) and showcases around 80 works, providing insight into the artistic production of John Graham, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and other important abstractionists of the period.

The exhibition makes clear John Graham’s crucial importance in paving the way for abstraction in America. Born in Kiev, Graham fled the Bolshevik Revolution, moving to the U.S., changing his name, and reinventing himself as an artist and tastemaker. Graham was an early advocate for Davis and de Kooning, even including paintings by the latter with works by Picasso and Matisse in an exhibition he organized for the McMillen Gallery in 1942. I found it humorous to discover that de Kooning, his name still unknown, was included in the catalogue of this show as “William Kooning.” American Vanguards provides a fascinating contrast to the MoMA’s recent de Kooning retrospective—examining a period in which many of today’s greats were still flying below the radar.

John Graham, The White Pipe, 1930. Oil on canvas mounted on board, 12 1/4 in. x 17 in. Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection. Gift of Dorothy Paris. 1961.56

A work from the Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection, a colorful still-life by John Graham, telegraphs the essence of this period. In The White Pipe (1930), Graham places a biomorphic shape on a black surface, executing the contours with thickly applied daubs of white paint. Graham punctuates the gray-blue background with black and white lines, creating a striking graphic effect. A vibrant red rectangle sets the top right corner aglow. American Vanguards successfully captures a period before artists began working in pure abstraction, when they were producing planar still-lifes in rich reds, vibrant yellows and blues, and geometric, Picasso-like portraits.

Although the show focuses mainly on works by Graham, Davis, Gorky, and de Kooning—who referred to themselves as “The Four Musketeers”—ample attention is paid to other emerging artists of the time, such as Jackson Pollock and Marsden Hartley. One entire gallery is dedicated to the painting and sculpture of David Smith—focusing on an interesting tie between the two media during this period. I was thrilled to see Lee Krasner represented by two works dating from 1940 and 1943, inserting her in the narrative of emerging Abstract Expressionism, which is often touted as a “boys club.”

John Graham, Poussin m’instruit (Poussin Teaches Me), 1944. Oil on panel, 60 in. x 48 in. Anthony F. Bultman IV and Ellis J. Bultman

The exhibition demonstrates how Graham tied disparate artists together and also how his own tastes and preferences changed. While he advocated for artists such as de Kooning and Davis in the 1930s and early ’40s, by the end of World War II, he was dismissing abstract art and advocating a return to figural painting. One of my favorite works in the show was a large painting by Graham, Poussin m’instruit (Poussin Teaches Me, 1944), depicting two nude men in vibrant magentas and fleshy pinks. After viewing wall after wall covered with largely abstract works, my attention was grabbed by this painting. Graham executes the two men’s musculature with quasi-scientific precision, making them look flayed—a radical shift from his earlier abstracted tableaus.

Before his death in 1961, Graham referred to Picasso as a “charlatan,” showing how drastically his artistic opinions had changed over the course of thirty years. But despite Graham’s radically shifting views, American Vanguards establishes him as an important and fascinating figure in the progression of early American abstractionism.

— Written by Carolyn F. Keogh, NYU CAS ’12 and Undergraduate Intern, Grey Art Gallery

Urban Design and Architecture Adjunct Professor Alexandra Lange in the New York Times, Sunday March 4

Why Don’t We Read About Architecture?

 

Jeremy M. LangeLever House, New York

“Buildings are everywhere,” writes Alexandra Lange, “large and small, ugly and beautiful, ambitious and dumb. We walk among them and live inside them but are largely passive dwellers in cities or towers, houses, open spaces, and shops we had no hand in creating.”

Buildings are discussed — indeed aspects of them obsessed upon — but almost exclusively in the context of economics. This building went over budget, that surplus of houses led to the foreclosure crisis, that condo broke the record for residential real estate, etc. To the layman, then, architecture is conveyed as little more than something that costs a lot and causes a lot of grief, rather than something with the potential to enhance our daily lives.

But as the architecture and design critic Lange points out in her new book, “Writing About Architecture,” we need to engage our citizenry in architecture in ways that move from passivity or accusation (i.e., Nimbyism) and to do so we need more … architecture critics.

Of course, the reverse has been occurring over the last decade. You can almost count the number of architectural critics at major newspapers on one hand, and while there’s been an explosion of opinion design and architecture blogs in recent years, they tend to preach to the converted or veer, with few exceptions, toward noncritical celebration or gleeful snark.

Jeremy M. LangeGuggenheim Museum, New York

When I spoke at the D-Crit program at the School of Visual Arts last fall, many of us agreed that 24/7 media carries some of the blame — it’s hard to be thoughtful when you’re writing five blog posts a day — but there’s no shortage of reasons for the current dearth of insightful architectural criticism (like the current dearth of architectural projects, for instance).

It was Martin Mull (or Steve Martin or Laurie Anderson — check out the discussion of quote provenance here) who said that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” To ruin the analogy further, writing about architecture is like mangling language, and far too often the experience of reading architectural writing feels about as pleasurable as tooth extraction.

To wit (with all apologies to the author, who will remain unidentified):

ANALYSIS: a territorial and social fragmentation, a typical “no-man’s land” undergoing the urban exodus, the settlement of the old and inactive persons, the absence of public place in the body scale substituted by the car. PROBLEMATIC: How to attract a new living to facilitate the social and urban mixity?

We can’t entirely blame the perpetrator of this crime, for it is this style of writing that is rewarded within academia. Indecipherability signifies superior intelligence. (The field of architecture is not alone in this — just ask this former Ph.D. grad student, who shudders at sentences she wrote while under the heady spell of such Continental theorists as Barthes, Derrida and Foucault.) And while I’m not suggesting we hew toward the lowest common denominator, architects and those who write about them are doing themselves a disservice by insisting on the impenetrability of discourse.

Why? Compare the above author’s approach with the one taken by the urban idol Jane Jacobs, who was uniquely successful in using her love of her surrounding built environment to make the case for preserving and expanding it. She writes in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”:

The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) … When I get home after work, the ballet is reaching its crescendo. This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s ….

The advertising man David Ogilvy wrote, “Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.” It is admittedly unfair to compare these two snippets of writing but I’ll do so to make the point often forgotten about criticism: it should elucidate (not obfuscate) if it has any hope of making an impact. In the end, who would garner support at a city planning meeting? Both authors are talking about the same thing, but it’s evident who is making a better case. The former is worried about the “site condition”; the latter is successful in speaking to the human one.

Jeremy M. LangeNoguchi Cube, New York

In “Writing About Architecture,” Lange recognizes the stakes inherent in the act of describing place. While she certainly is pushing writers, readers and her students to aim for clarity in criticism, Lange goes much further, arguing that architecture critics be invested intellectually and emotionally in the world that surrounds them. The iconic critics Lange celebrates enliven the spaces they write about — whether they love them or hate them. They notice things. They’re steeped in history, in context and provenance. They take their time. They make the reader want to experience the spaces described.

See for example, this paper’s former architecture critic, the late Herbert Muschamp, writing about Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao in 1997:

If you want to look into the heart of American art today, you are going to need a passport. You will have to pack your bags, leave the U.S.A. and find your way to Bilbao, a small rustic city in the northeast corner of Spain. The trip is not convenient, and you should not expect to have much fun while you’re there … [but] those who visit Bilbao, however, may come away thinking that art is not entirely remote from matters of life and death.

Jeremy M. LangeWhitney Museum, New York

And Michael Sorkin shows, in this 1985 Village Voice review of the Whitney Museum, how a building can be described vividly — no obfuscation required, no need to hide his delight, just clear description and unbridled enthusiasm:

The Breuer Whitney is a masterpiece … Breuer divided his Madison Avenue elevation into three parts: a thin concrete wall butted up against its neighbors: a narrow zigzagging band containing among other things, the great stair; and the main stepping mass, housing the galleries, to which are affixed the winning “eyebrow” windows, apt symbols of museum going.

Many of the writers Lange includes in her book offered perspectives that not only helped shape local and national conversations around design and the built environment, but affected outcomes as well. It’s rarer today that a piece of criticism might have that effect, rare that such pieces appear on page one. There is an amazing kaleidoscope of good writing about buildings online — though there’s also an infinite number of outlets for the dissemination of not-so-good writing.

Architecture, writes Lange, “is the art you cannot avoid” and it carries a burden that the other arts don’t — it must reconcile aesthetics and ideas with user functionality. A painting or a novel need only please or provoke its audience; it doesn’t then also require setbacks, parking minimums and LEED certification. Fewer of us are affected — or even in regular contact with the other arts — while all of us are inextricably connected to the built environment.

Jeremy M. LangeCentral Park, New York

Bold, opinionated, thoughtful words about the stuff that surrounds us might result in better buildings (and cities and suburbs, infrastructure and parks). And the importance of that can’t be stressed enough. Because, as Ada Louise Huxtable, another of Lange’s heroes, put it in one of her perfectly titled essays about the importance of successful planning in New York (this one: “Sometimes We Do It Right”), “It only takes one opening in the wrong place, one ‘bonus’ space placed according to current zoning (read ‘business’) practice, to ruin it all.” Architecture critics, Lange rightly concludes, can act not just as writers but as advocates, and, in so doing, can “try to make it better.”,