Articles by Robert Campbell, FAIA

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

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

“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

An architectural language I find it increasingly hard to get very excited about these style battles, and I suspect a lot of people feel the same way. Thomas Gordon Smith spoke at the conference, and he sounded entirely sane. (As one nationally known architect said to me on the way out of the hall, “The dragon turns out not to be such a dragon.”) He presented Classicism as an architectural language of well-understood conventions, a language that can and should be used inventively. I’ve visited his school and liked the student work. Photography: © Scott Frances/Esto Richard Meier’s Phoenix courthouse

“The development of an official style must be avoided. Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa.” The words are those of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They’re part of his famous "Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture" (1962), which helped inspire a revolution in government architecture. The revolution was the Design Excellence program in the General Services Administration (GSA—sorry, it’s hard to write about government without bogging in multisyllables). From 1994 to 2005, under the GSA’s chief architect, Ed Feiner, the program tried to choose the best architects in the country for the design of courthouses

Fractals are the Stata. No two places are exactly the same: “The lack of repetition animates the building.” Coffee and whiteboards seem to be everywhere, and people casually join discussions as they navigate their way through the plan: “You run into people you might not have seen in years. I get lost all the time.” Photography: © Roland Halbe Interiors provide a variety of spaces to gather. A voice of mild disagreement is that of Noam Chomsky, the linguist and political activist who is the Stata’s best-known inhabitant. Chomsky’s world isn’t fractal. It’s a conventional suite of offices. He says

When Frank Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT opened three years ago, it got a lot of press, especially for its novel appearance. I wrote at the time [record, July 2004, page 61]: “It looks as if it’s about to collapse. Columns tilt at scary angles. Walls teeter, swerve, and collide in random curves and angles. Materials change wherever you look: brick, mirror-surface steel, brushed aluminum, brightly colored paint, corrugated metal. Everything looks improvised, as if thrown up at the last moment.” The Stata was even pictured in a Doonsbury comic strip, where a character calls it “pretty cool.” Photography: ©