Christopher Hawthorne is the architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times.   Christopher Hawthorne     “L.A. IS THE MOST INTERESTING CITY IN THE country right now, because of what’s happening with its urbanism, more than its architecture,” states Christopher Hawthorne, who has been the architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times for three years. The city that became synonymous with sprawl has “hit the limits of its growth and is turning back on itself,” he explains. “But it’s not just getting denser; it’s having to redefine itself as a city.” This redefinition is affecting everything from mass transit and

Blair Kamin is the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune.     Blair Kamin “We now live in a culture of infinite choices,” says Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, Blair Kamin. “You go to Home Depot and there are 60 different kinds of floors you can put in your basement, whereas in 1950 you would have had two. A lot of our architecture is like that.” Kamin is explaining how the boxy skylight vaults of Steven Holl’s sensuous Bloch Building at the historicist Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri [RECORD, July 2007, page 92], consist of myriad customized pieces

Paul Goldberger is the architecture critic of The New Yorker.   Paul Goldberger     “I DON’T SEE THE REGIONAL differences in design that were apparent in the past,” states Paul Goldberger when asked what American architecture looks like from his perspective at The New Yorker. “Trends today are national or even global. Sustainability is certainly one. We should be doing more on this, but we’re doing more than we did in the past.” He also talks about “the democratization of architecture,” a process that in recent years has brought Modernism to the masses, or at least, to a larger

David Dillon is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News.   David Dillon     “Dallas is a very image-conscious place, and it has always been looking to headlines,” says David Dillon, who writes on architecture for The Dallas Morning News. Lately, the headlines have been filled with the starry names of the architects for the Dallas Arts District—an opera house by Norman Foster, a theater by Rem Koolhaas, and a science museum by Thom Mayne will soon join the existing sculpture museum by Renzo Piano and symphony hall by I.M. Pei. “It’s important to set the bar high,

Catherine Fox is the art and architecture critic of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.   Catherine Fox     “Buildings here in Atlanta remain disappointing, with a few exceptions,” states Catherine Fox, the art and architecture critic for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Renzo Piano’s addition to the High Museum is one of those exceptions. “The expansion, which is actually three buildings and a restaurant arrayed around a plaza, opened in 2005. As you’d expect, it’s a handsome project, designed to complement rather than outdo the Meier building, and it offers wonderful spaces for viewing art. The “piazza” at the center of the complex

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