Covid-19 Architectural Journalism: A Conversation
This conversation began when Peggy Deamer (architect, educator, and activist) and Mary Woods (historian of architectural journalism) realized independently and at the same time, how dismayed (indeed, shocked) they were with what Michael Kimmelman, architectural critic of the New York Times, has chosen to highlight in his series, “Take a Virtual Tour.” The series comprises over ten online tours with different architectural guides, and strolls the reader through different parts of New York City. At this time of crisis, how could he be so tone-deaf (figure 1)? We each wrote separate “Letters to the Editor” expressing our consternation (figures 2 and 3). Neither was published, but we feel that our views need airing. Hence our thanks to PLATFORM for offering this opportunity to continue that discussion here.
Figure 1. Nipun Prabhakar, Untitled Collage, 2020. New York Times photographs sourced for collage by: George Etheredge; Zack DeZon; and Vincent Tullo.
PD: I love that we are both pissed off at Kimmelman and the New York Times. And I really like that you are holding Kimmelman up to a social standard set by Sorkin—don’t we miss him?!—and Huxtable. My letter identifies that the Times is capable of recognizing that cultural workers are workers—their journalists have written pieces on the difficult fates of musicians, opera stars, filmmakers, and art museums curators during Covid-19 epidemic—and included them in the lockdown-and-out-of-work narrative. Apparently for them, as for the public at large, architects operate in some ideal sphere outside our socio-economic system. My dismay is at how “architecture” and architects are constructed in the public imaginary; that there is no link between what is produced—architectural and urban form, and how it is produced—in offices precariously dependent on clients’/developers’ commissions architects mostly don’t condone. But you make the point that even if we lay that “how” question aside, the real work that is going on in the extended sphere of builders/designers is so much more layered, complex, and relevant than what Kimmelman offers.
Figure 2. Peggy Deamer, 8 April 2020 Letter to the Editor, New York Times (unpublished).
Figure 3. Mary N. Woods, 14 April 2020 Letter to the Editor, New York Times (unpublished).
MNW: Since Huxtable left the Times in 1981, her successors have all been white males of relative privilege. Despite adding more diverse voices to its cultural pages in the last years, you can still count on one hand critics of color who regularly cover visual and performing arts.
PD: Yes. I think the issue of identity is very important, and not just regarding gender and race, but also background: did critics ever participate in the activity they now speak for? or the position taken as a journalist: advocacy or reporting? reporting or opinion-shaping? criticism or celebration? or their own politics: cultural elitism or rank-and-file? Kimmelman moved from music to art to culture before landing on architecture. His goal of redirecting the public (and architectural) gaze away from buildings/icons/aesthetics toward the public realm is admirable, but his “liberal” take on our discipline operates from arm-chair privilege that avoids the real test (read: not just liberal, but leftist) of addressing the labor conditions of cultural production. I know from conversations that he feels that the public isn’t interested in that. But how is the public to know that there is a relationship between what we produce and the profit-driven economic conditions in which we are producing?
“At this time of crisis, how could Kimmelman be so tone-deaf?”
I recognize that journalism aimed at the public, not to the trade, comes with complications: educating a public while “representing” the discipline; contributing to the journal’s bottom-line that is linked to a status quo determination of what the public “wants.” The bottom-line pressures and a critic’s need to cater to the popular, you have reminded me, is a problem beyond Kimmelman. Architecture has fallen from public concern. There are increasingly few architecture critics on city newspaper staff—we have lost or never had architecture critics in half of the nation’s ten largest cities. But it is a chicken and egg condition. No writing, no interest.
MNW: Credited as a pioneer of modern architectural criticism, Huxtable joined the Times as its first full-time architecture critic in 1963. Covering not only design and architecture but also urban planning and historic preservation, she sometimes outraged architects, building owners, and real estate developers. Since 2008 the nexus between coverage and advertising has driven special sections like “Home and Garden.” After seven years it was discontinued with design and architecture dispersed over Real Estate, Styles, Travel, Food, NYT Magazine, and “the luxury lifestyle” covered in T Magazine. While architecture criticism and architects’ profiles continued in the Arts section, this coverage markedly declined with Kimmelman’s arrival in 2011. His “diversionary tours” of Manhattan and Brooklyn (safe as the outer borough most like Manhattan) infuriate me because they command far more space and prominence for architecture and urban design than we have seen in a long time. They trivialize architecture and planning and marginalize architects and preservationists amid health, economic, social and political crises always present and now so exposed by COVID-19.
“Identity and experience shape the stories we are told. Or not.”
PD: Yes, the special sections in which architecture had a bit of now-lost presence have devolved into PR releases for upcoming films, plays, fashion, furniture, and decoration and attracting niche advertisers. And Kimmelman’s tours are part of a branding operation for a city that needs tourists to come back and shoppers to go out. It is frustrating.
MNW: Kimmelman’s interlocutors have all been white academics or professionals (women and men) from architecture, preservation, landscape, and engineering. I fantasize about the other New York cities not on Kimmelman’s map: Harlem with African-American activist and preservationist Michael Henry Adams; Queens and the Bronx, COVID-19 hotspots, with graffiti artist Lady Pink (who wanted to be an architect); and Flushing’s immigrant neighborhoods with archivist Kevin Chu from the Museum of Chinese in America; and historian Tom Campanella, fourth-generation Brooklynite of Italian-American heritage, who “led” the only tour about built environments for working-class New Yorkers of color and ethnicity. Sorkin would surely have spoken about neoliberal and now COVID-devastated spaces along the daily walk from his West Village home to his Tribeca office. Identity and experience shape the stories we are told. Or not.
PD: Indeed. It makes me think about how architecture criticism is best framed in moments of urgency. Critics writing in national journals are doing better work, e.g., Justin Davidson at New York Magazine, Oliver Wainwright and other critics of The Guardian, and Kyle Chayka of the New Yorker. Perhaps because these critics don’t have a “beat,” they can move beyond “reporting.” But I also think about Peter Murray, whose work you kindly put me on to. He went from being a student activist fighting against a techno-determined architectural education by creating the magazine Megascope to directing Architectural Design (following the 60’s European radicals he modeled AD on The Whole Earth Catalogue), to becoming the editor of Building Design. Currently Murray is the Director of the New London Architecture, a public exhibition venue. In all of these roles, he linked architecture to development, real estate, and construction to show how they, as a mix, can be re-directed to making better cities and linked it to his original activist work. As a member of an activist organization arguing for a more rewarding and empowered discipline (the Architecture Lobby), I’m aware, as is Murray, of how important it is to link architecture to the larger politico-economic system in which it operates.
MNW: The voices of those who build and inhabit built environments just like systemic forces shaping them are absent from our criticism and reporting in both print and social media too. Neera Adarkar, Mumbai architect, educator, and preservationist, once said: “As architects, we should create space for people to speak, not to speak for them . . . A good architect is empathetic to the needs of others.” Adarkar’s spaces for others to speak mean that we (critics, students, historians, and designers) must learn to listen and dialogue with those outside the academy and profession. The irony is our discussion for greater inclusion takes place in a design publication.
PD: Yes! And be very conscious of who we supposedly “speak for” when we claim to address “community needs.” As we learn from Black Lives Matter, we can’t ignore how both the academy and the profession contribute to racial injustice and spatial inequality. We need to address not just our whiteness, but the fact that we agree to work for developers who actively marginalize communities through gentrification or develop the prisons, border walls, or police stations that supposedly keep white people “safe;” that we participate in a system of labor exploitation that is the backbone of racial degradation; that our professional status plays into class (and therefore) racial warfare.
President Trump’s obsession with property lost rather than lives lost can only be countenanced in a country in which capitalism trumps democracy. Architects participate in that, and an activist architectural journalist would make that clear; she wouldn’t need to worry about attending to the public’s vs the profession’s interest. Both would get educated for the better.
MNW: Five years ago, Kimmelman implored the AIA to condemn architects designing the death chambers and solitary confinement cells overwhelmingly occupied by African-Americans and other minorities. Recently, he took up this issue again. There is hope.
The authors would like to thank Matthew Kopel, Cornell University, for his invaluable advice regarding illustrations.
