Commentary & Criticism

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Robert Campbell, FAIA, is the architecture critic of The Boston Globe.   Robert Campbell, FAIA     Readers of Robert Campbell’s columns in our pages perhaps don’t know that The Boston Globe’s longtime architecture critic helped the General Services Administration select Thom Mayne and Morphosis to design the San Francisco Federal Building, completed in 2007. “I’ve never seen a building of his that didn’t have major flaws, but I felt he needed a client who could hold his feet to the fire,” Campbell says. He compares the U.S. to the Netherlands, where young architects have greater chances at larger commissions.

Unless you have business up in the tower, you don’t even get to go up the escalator. A guard stands at its foot and shoos you away. So the one experience that ought to matter—that of rising on the escalator from the old building into the new tower—is denied to the public. Photo ' Chuck Choi Invitation required: Access to the space carved out of the Deco building is restricted to Hearst employees and guests. We dined on the uppermost of the 40 floors. Here, where the program changes from office use to eating space, you’d think there’d be an

Now that it has been there for a year and I’ve had my chance to learn to love it, maybe it’s a good time to say why I dislike the Hearst Tower in Manhattan so much. The Hearst, which of course was designed by Foster + Partners, looks like a misplaced missile silo. It’s as if the Pentagon, with its usual deftness of touch, had confused its maps and located this chunk of military hardware in Manhattan instead of Florida. Photo ' Chuck Choi The new Hearst Tower sits on top of a six-story base built in the 1920s. It’s

The form of the city rises from the convergence of legislation, imagination, ambition, and resistance. This complex of forces is getting a workout a few blocks from my office in Lower Manhattan, where Donald Trump and partners are building the Trump SoHo, a 45-story “condominium hotel” containing 400 apartments—ranging in size from 425 to 10,000 square feet—priced at $3,000 a square foot and said to be selling briskly. The tower, which is going up fast and is scheduled to open in spring 2009, sits adjacent to SoHo and will be, by far, the tallest building in an area characterized by

One obvious question is why Trump and his partners aren’t simply building an actual hotel on the site. According to Julius Schwarz, executive vice president of the Bayrock Group (which initially secured the site with the Sapir Organization before bringing in Trump for his inimitable cachet) and the managing partner for the project, “It’s a financing mechanism” designed as a hedge against a potential glut of hotels. “You can model it out 10 years. Right now, there’s a shortage of hotels. So people are going to be building hotels and the rates will eventually come down. Hotel rooms will always

“Instead of experiencing our being in the world, we behold it from outside as spectators of images projected on the surface of the retina.” Juhani Pallasmaa Photography: © Jeff Goldberg/ESTO At WGBH, Polshek Partnership turned part of the facade into an LED mural. Is architecture turning into a purely visual sport? Will it be just like video games, except that it won’t have all those crashing noises? In my home city of Boston, two recent designs are both terrific in their own way. But they’re scary in what they portend for the future of architecture. Of our five, six, or

Before digital was born For many years I’ve held in my mind, as a counter to the headlong rush to a purely visual architecture, the memory of approaching a small church in an Italian hill town. This was an experience of architecture of all the senses. First came the feeling of a slight ache in the knees, an ache that told me I had climbed to an elevation. Then the entry into the building, the sudden drop in temperature, the increase in humidity. Photography: © Bruce T. Martin Elkus/Manfredi designed a Neiman-Marcus facade as a rippling ribbon. The hushed yet

In the catalog for Antony Gormley’s recent exhibition, Blind Light, at the Hayward Gallery in London, the curator Jacky Klein cites Brancusi’s dictum that “architecture is inhabited sculpture.” But since the onset of the Constructivist movement in Russia in the early 20th century, sculpture itself has become architectonic and inhabited, if not physically, then mentally, in the seductive manner that the imagination allows the viewer to experience its interiority.' Photography: © Michele Lamanna/Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch Gallery For the Venice Art Biennale in 2007, Putrih created Venice, Atmospheric (above two), which recalls old movie palaces. Not satisfied merely

After landing at the dock and walking through the parklike serenity of this walled island, you finally catch a view of the cinema, a pavilion with the same oval rondeur, says the artist, as the great Fenice Theater. Though it functions as a theater showing documentary films and holds an audience of 35 to 40 on its stepped rows of square seats, the pavilion retains a special intimacy and scale that make viewers feel they are entering an architectural model itself. On the outside, Putrih assembled a seemingly random (though actually precise) criss-cross installation of rusted trusswork bolted into place.

As part of his recently released plan for New York by the year 2030, entitled PLANYC: A Greener, Greater New York, Mayor Michael Blooomberg is actively promoting a scheme for congestion pricing in the busiest parts of Manhattan. Modeled on programs in Singapore, London, and Stockholm, the system is intended to curb vehicular traffic (and raise money for public transportation) by imposing charges ($8 for cars and $21 for trucks) to enter the borough below 96th Street. The proposal has the support of virtually every bien-pensant urbanist in town, although it has met some resistance, particularly from the outer boroughs