Hasta La Ideas

It’s hard enough to craft intelligent design criticism, let alone guide others in doing so, but Alexandra Lange excels at both. The Brooklyn-based critic, journalist, and architectural historian pens pointed reviews and thought-provoking observations on the visual world for Design Observer (“Stop That: Minimalist Posters” is among our recent favorites) and on her own Tumblr (Hello Kitty spotted in Lisbon!), and teaches design criticism in SVA’s D-Crit program and at New York University. Having co-authored the 2010 must-read Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle), Lange is preparing for the release of her next book, a primer on writing and reading architectural criticism that will be published next spring by the Princeton Architectural Press. In the meantime, she’s branching out beyond the built environment with Let’s Get Critical, her new shortform blog that cherrypicks reviews and essays from the wider world of culture. What makes a piece of writing worthy of appearing on the site? “Everything on Let’s Get Critical should be well-written, its point of view clear, its language hooky,” says Lange. We reined in our verbosity and formulated seven semi-lucid questions for the veteran critic and pied piper of quality criticism.

1. What led you to create Let’s Get Critical?
I’ve been writing and teaching architecture and design criticism for about six years now, and while I love it, the topic started to feel a little confining. I love movies and TV, prefer to read novels, follow pop culture. A person cannot live by architecture alone. At the same time, I felt like most sites about culture, like most sites about design, were purely celebratory. So I wanted to create a place for intelligent writing about intelligent work, where culture was front and center rather than secondary to politics or business or sports.

2. What’s the first thing you read in the morning?
Since I got my first iPhone in January, it is usually my email. But I still get the hard copy New York Times, so then I go downstairs to breakfast and try to read at least one section (I have two small children). I read it back to front, so I usually start with Arts, Dining, or Home. I feel that I get much more out of the paper than I do the Times online or on my phone. By the end of the day I have at least flipped through every section, so I see things in Business or Sports that I would never seek out.

I also think it is important for my kids to have an idea that reading the paper is something that you do every day. If all they see is me staring at my phone all the time, they don’t know what I am doing. Last spring, when the Times was writing about Turn Off the Dark every day, my son got very interested in the news about Spiderman, which I thought was great.

3. What’s the best thing you read over the summer and why?
Not the best, but one that I still think about, and one which relates to culture and criticism: Tina Fey‘s Bossypants. Why, I thought after I read it, do you have to be as fabulously successful as Tina Fey to be listened to when you speak about the way women, and particularly mothers, are treated at and treat work? There’s a terrible silence in architecture about how it really is for women, and I think we all need to be bolder and more straightforward about talking about our children, the trade-offs we make, what we can and can’t do. If no one listens until you have a cult hit, there’s a problem.
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Now that the six month long ordeal over John Galliano‘s drunken racial slurs has ended, with a French court deciding to slap an immediately suspended sentence on the former top Dior designer and order him to pay up a relatively small fee, the government can now focus its attention on this year’s other Nazi-remarks-based controversy, this one involving director Lars von Trier. Though nowhere near the media-bombarding scandal that Galliano’s very public trial was, there was still plenty of press at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, when the director’s tongue seemed to get away from him, resulting in a train wreck of a press conference for his new film where he said things like, “[Hitler] is not what you would call a good guy, but, yeah, I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit” and ended with a sort of what-have-I-done quote that’s perhaps the worst possible soundbite ever: “Ok, I am a Nazi.” The AP is reporting that von Trier himself has said that he was recently interviewed by Danish police officers concerning charges placed against him by the French, alleging that he’d broken “French law against the glorification of war crimes.” However, the AP also reports that the French police, such charges don’t exist. Apparently at this time, the authorities are still investigating to see if there’s a case, but have not yet charged the director with a thing. So simply a misunderstanding or language barrier, or just some wishful, bizarre thinking from von Trier, who seems to enjoy a good stir of controversy now and again?

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“It looks like it’s from another planet, and a good planet. A planet with better designers.”

-Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, describing the iMac upon its debut in 1998

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It’s been a red letter year for the relationship between the D&AD and Neville Brody. Just a few months back, he was handed their annual President’s Award, and now he’s just been named the organization’s upcoming Vice President for 2012. The legendary designer-turned-rabble-rousing-dean of the Royal College of Art, will serve in the position under new President and ad industry vet, Rosie Arnold, the second woman ever to hold the position. It appears to be fairly nice timing to have such a high-profile executive branch, given that next year the D&AD will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Here’s a bit about Brody’s ascendancy and a brief bio:

At the Executive Board meeting, Neville Brody was ratified as D&AD Vice President by unanimous vote. Neville is one of the world’s most renowned designers, and is the Dean of the Royal College of Art. Neville rose to promincence in the 80’s as the Art Director of The Face, before moving to Arena in 1986. He is a designer, typographer, art director, brand strategist and consultant, and his agency Research Studios has clients all over the world.

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For those, of which there were many, who either regularly disagreed with, or outright despised, one of the country’s most high profile architecture critics, the NY Times‘ Nicolai Ouroussoff, their red letter day finally came at the end of June, when he left the paper to pursue writing books. Now it’s come time to judge the new guy: Michael Kimmelman. As we told you back in early July, upon his hiring, Kimmelman was an internal transfer at the paper, moving both from its “Abroad” section (he’d also previously worked reviewing music and was the Times‘ lead art critic for a stint) and from Berlin, where he’d been living since 2007, to take on the new post. Yesterday marked both his first review for the paper in the new position (a look at a new housing project being built in the South Bronx), as well as penning a short introduction for himself for the Arts Beat blog. Here’s a bit from that:

…I’m interested in urbanism, city planning, housing and social affairs, the environment and health, politics and culture — in all the ways we live, in other words, and not just in how buildings look or who designs them, although those things are inseparable from the rest. The influence on architecture of social scientists and medical experts now investigating how actually to quantify the success and failure of buildings, to establish criteria of proof, an increasingly important word, in terms of, say, the claims of green and healthy sites, seems no less urgent than Zaha Hadid’s or Norman Foster’s latest undertaking. Who uses works of architecture, and how, and who benefits from them and who doesn’t, also matters, obviously, and from Colombia to Coney Island, Dubai to Detroit, ways of rethinking these issues have already begun to reshape thinking in architecture schools and offices and beyond.

It’s early days, for sure, but we’re certain there’s already lots of speculation on how he’ll differ from his predecessor. Tangentially related, the NY Observer made note that Kimmelman’s first review made the front of the Times‘ homepage, something very rare for architecture criticism, and something they wonder might be a sign of either lending more importance to the subject or was just a on-off passing mention because they have someone new steering the ship.

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