In 1998, the British critic Martin Pawley rather dramatically announced what he called “the strange death of architectural criticism.” Pawley lamented the disappearance of an aggressive, “take-no-prisoners” approach to critical writing about architecture, which he felt was being replaced by “wall-to-wall testimonials of praise.” Illustration: © Ross MacDonald I wonder what Pawley, who served as architecture critic for both the Guardian and Observer newspapers and died in 2008, would say about the state of the field today, particularly in this country. If the praise, at least for certain celebrity architects, has grown even more over-the-top, the number of critics has

Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant, Los Angeles, Grinstein/Daniels Architects Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more tumultuous at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), which has been buffeted by a string of financial and personnel crises in recent years, a new brouhaha has surfaced. And this time it concerns architecture—to be precise, a significant controversy surrounding a planned MOCA exhibition called A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California. The show is a major component of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. (see page 59), a series of exhibitions running through the summer in venues across

An exhibition at SFMOMA examines the work but not the legacy of Lebbeus Woods. Lebbeus Woods, San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City, 1995, graphite and pastel on paper, 14.5 inches by 23 inches. Lebbeus Woods, who died last year at age 72, was among the most singularly gifted and stubbornly consistent architects in American history. His fantastically dense drawings in pencil and graphite imagined not just new kinds of buildings?some burrowed into the earth and others floating in the air or through space?but new cities and new worlds. Though he is often connected with the Deconstructivist movement and

David Chipperfield looks for common ground at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. Almost by definition, the Venice Architecture Biennale is a wildly uneven affair. It combines a main exhibition overseen by a major architect, critic, or curator with a scattered collection of separately organized national pavilions. And it seems to get bigger and flashier with every edition, as ancillary exhibitions, press conferences, and Bellini-soaked parties in rented palazzi sprawl across most of the city of Venice. The odds that these diverse elements will come together to offer a compelling message about architecture, architects, buildings, or cities would seem close to

There is a good deal to admire about the architecture of the new Barnes Foundation, which opened May 19 on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway, just down the road from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The sober, handsome, and exquisitely detailed museum, designed by the increasingly busy New York City architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, offers a rare combination of material richness and spatial ingenuity.

There are any number of reasons to envy Ryan Burns and his wife, Aline Nakashima.