ABSTRACT
Architecture is a deeply self-critical cultural practice: architecture students are introduced
to the discipline with weekly reviews by their instructors, concluded by the ritual of the
‘final crit’, where a group of academic jurors picks at students’ work in public. The design
process itself is characterised by an iterative feedback loop between developing
alternatives and judgmental decision-making, selecting and rationalizing. Architectural
acquisition follows similar processes of (anonymous) competitions or charrettes, where
design teams compete with each other and are judged by experts (often peers and
clients). Once a design has been commissioned, is fully developed and gets finally built,
the architectural critics (often again peers and scholars) inspect the work and exercise
value judgments directed to specific audiences. This latter public discourse on edifices
is what we normally regard as architectural criticism proper, similar to the ones in other
cultural areas such as art, opera, music, dance, theatre, literature, cinema, fashion,
design or cuisine. While reviews of past and current buildings proliferate through media
outlets from online blogs and newsletters to trade magazines, journals, daily press,
fashion and lifestyle formats and sometimes TV features, this form of criticism remains
on the level of journalism, advertising and public outreach, and in its best examples turns
into a piece of literature. At times of dramatic changes in the media landscape, the
importance of mediators between architecture and the larger public cannot be
acknowledged enough, though on the other hand, reviews do not exhaust the
possibilities and roles of criticism in architecture.
