Fifty years ago, in the 75th-anniversary issue of RECORD, editor in chief Emerson Goble addressed an issue he was constantly asked about—why the magazine wasn’t as critical as it had been in its early years. “We are charged with not having the nerve,” he wrote in July 1966. Before giving his reasons, let’s look at the magazine’s beginnings, when its critics would “give ’em hell,” as Goble put it.

When RECORD was founded in 1891, it aimed for a general audience as well as a professional one. Its critics Montgomery Schuyler, a newspaper journalist, and Russell Sturgis, an architect and historian, straightforwardly assessed the pluses and minuses of a building or urban enclave, according to aesthetic and, to a degree, functional criteria. Schuyler castigated heavy-handed eclecticism—what he called “artchitecture”—with its mishmash of styles. He considered proportion and scale, as well as how the program and structure were expressed on a building’s exterior. Sturgis’s more traditional aesthetic emphasized a Ruskinian predilection for the play of light and shadow—“the doctrine of the beauty of the penumbra,” as he called it. Yet Sturgis also welcomed the functional expression of structure in new buildings going up in the 1890s. He approved the steel-framed “rationalism” of the Bayard Building in New York by Louis Sullivan (with Lyndon Smith) but regarded the brick arches under the cornice as an “anomaly” (July–September 1898).