Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic, and author of Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities. (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in The Architect’s Newspaper, Architectural Record, Dwell, Metropolis, Print, New York Magazine and The New York Times.


































































03.26.12
‘Deco Japan’ + Designing Women
The Japan Society's new exhibition
"Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945" displays the surprising globalism of this little-known period in Japanese design, when pent-up post-1923-earthquake desires for new goods and new traditions met up with a new openness to Western arts and the rise of industrialization




































































































09.28.10
Yummy!
I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition
Appetite, curated by Alexander Tochilovsky at the Herb Lubalin Center at Cooper Union, not least because it was bite-sized.




09.26.10
Masdar: So Many Questions
I was not planning to post anything about 
Sukkah City. It all just looked like an architecture studio: so much effort, such worked-over results, and an inability to see the forest for the trees.




09.24.10
Rendering v. Reality in Sukkah City
I was not planning to post anything about
Sukkah City. It all just looked like an architecture studio: so much effort, such worked-over results, and an inability to see the forest for the trees.











09.08.10
In Dwell: Hands Off the Icons
In the 
October 2010 issue of Dwell, which celebrates the magazine’s tenth anniversary by revisiting its own (generally happy) homeowners, I offer the following Argument.




09.07.10
Coming to the V&A: Tower of Power
It is not often that 
a museum blogs about Postmodernism, Michael Sorkin (one of the great take-downs) and credits the (female) renderer who made the AT&T Building look the best it ever has.





08.30.10
Lunch with the Critics: Park51 and 15 Penn Plaza
In my 
second critical lunch with Mark Lamster, in the creepy climes of the Hotel Pennsylvania, we discuss the urbanism, politics and skyline posturing of Park51 and 15 Penn Plaza.

















07.27.10
On DO: Lunch with the Critics
Please weigh in on 
Mark Lamster and my new Design Observer feature, "Lunch with the Critics," in which we observe the new Lincoln Center.








07.20.10
Culture Shed: Where’s the Neighborhood?
CultureGrrl 
offers a critique of the NEA grant for Culture Shed, the Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group design for a Kunsthalle with retractable roofs over at Hudson Yards.





07.18.10
Hung Ceilings
Mad Men returns, and now it's time to speculate on the evolution of Peggy’s hair and the meaning of Betty’s dress choices




07.13.10
Time to Move On
A very nice 
house in Montauk embodies the most recent cliches in architecture: floating staircases, pocket doors, and glass floors.







07.06.10
Below Black Rock
While the plaza around the 
CBS Building in Manhattan has always seemed perverse, it is now made worse with the addition of a bank.




07.02.10
The Personality of Parks
Until Pier 6 at 
Brooklyn Bridge Park opened, my only experience of parks as a parent had been of neighborhood parks










06.17.10
Diana Center & Architectural Bull----
Though rave reviews (
Architect, Metropolis, previously New York) are rolling in for Weiss/Manfredi’s Diana Center at Barnard College, every review has praised two things that I quickly dismissed as the most basic architectural bullshit: the copper glass and the street-level transparency.







06.11.10
Op Art Eye Candy
I’m lucky that I get to live with a
Julian Stanczak painting, bought by my father-in-law in 1968, when Op Art was really something.




06.10.10
Pomo Time Machine
I’m writing more about
Warren Platner, my favorite terribly wonderful or wonderfully terrible architect.








06.02.10
Bloggers in the Archive
Geoff Manaugh’s announcement, on
BLDGBLOG, that he would be blogging from the CCA this summer irritated me, partly because the idea is not brand new.




05.27.10
The Plastics
This month’s
Vogue, which had several enraging features, is not yet fully online except for Blake Lively, bathing suits, clear plastic.






05.21.10
The Anti-Enthusiasts
Design Blogs: The Vacuum of Enthusiasm, my Design Observer manifesto on what the world of design on the internet needs, lives on in the comments.








05.14.10
It Was All Yellow
In 
Buying In, author Rob Walker avoids talking about the aesthetics of the Livestrong bracelet.




05.12.10
In Metropolis: The Visceralist
I spent a day and a half with
Peter Bohlin in deepest Pennsylvania and New York State, and was very impressed with his house projects and attitude toward design.






05.07.10
On Archpaper: Saccharine Design
My review of
Marcel Wanders’ exhibition Daydreams at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for The Architect’s Newspaper just went online and let’s just say I was not impressed.








05.02.10
What I Learned @dcritconference
The
D-Crit Conference is just a memory, so as a tribute to the afternoon presentations I saw, I offer a set of tangents.













04.15.10
All in the Execution
Ian Baldwin's review of The Grid Book calls out the coffee-table book format and it's middlebrow achievements.










04.03.10
Has the High Line Ruined Us?
I went to
Brooklyn Bridge Park on opening day in the pouring rain with stroller.






03.31.10
Moynihan on Design
At
tonight’s lecture at D-Crit, Casey Jones, director of design excellence and the arts for the U.S. General Services Administration, quoted from Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, written in 1962.




03.30.10
Texts Without Context
I keep thinking about Michiko Kakutani’s piece,
Texts Without Context, that begins the discussion of what is being lost to culture by the supremacy of the web.












03.16.10
Things of Beauty
Saul Bass matchbook covers are about the most beautiful things I have seen in some time.








03.08.10
Not A Learning Experience
The Privileges finally gives a real satire of almost-present day New York City, in which money is discussed and no one has to learn their lesson.






03.03.10
The (Architectural) Anthologist
After some digressions weird and
wonderful, the Nicholson Baker I loved from The Mezzanine and U and I and Room Temperature seems to be back, cranky and at sea and procrastinating.















02.03.10
In AN 02: As the Tide Turns
In MoMA’s 
Rising Currents exhibition, certain tropes of contemporary waterfront design immediately surfaced.

















01.13.10
The Yuck Factor
Watch
District 9 as a palate cleanser after the visual feast of Avatar.






01.07.10
On DO: Skating on the Edge of Taste
The American Restaurant in Kansas City, designed by Warren Platner, is subject of a long essay on that architect and interior designer’s career.




01.06.10
I Heart Huxtable
Ada Louise Huxtable is still the most knowledgeable, elegant, thoughtful critic out there.







12.31.09
Last Post of 2009: Interview, Casey Jones
I interviewed the GSA’s newish head of Design Excellence,
Casey Jones, earlier this month about the future of this government program to ensure better architecture for government buildings






12.21.09
Exciting Multi-Generational Moment
An essay and slideshow on the
design of James Joyce’s Ulysses by my mother, Martha Scotford, appears on Design Observer, where I was recently made a contributing writer.






















11.22.09
Another New York
Every time I get an issue of
New York Magazine lately I ask myself: is Adam Moss turning it into a men’s magazine?



















10.24.09
Petting Zoo
On Thursday I took my class on a field trip to
One Bryant Park, the sustainable skyscraper that is almost complete at the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue.























































































Observed


A number of prominent—and progressive—initiatives that once promised to attract women and people of color to the tech industry (including Girls In Tech and Women Who Code) are closing. Three reporters at The Washington Post dig in: “The drop in support for programs that tech companies once touted as a sign of their commitment to adding women, Black people and Hispanic people to their ranks follows a right-wing campaign to challenge diversity initiatives in court.”

Celebrating Black Business month with two inspiring design legends, Kevan Hall and TJ Walker – the founders of the Black Design Collective.

Book cover design is a careful navigation between creativity and brute-force market logic. But is it also inherently racist?

Designer's weigh in on … the Olympics!

Billed as a “color trend intelligence service,” Pantone Color Insider provides global data on use of all 15,000 shades in the company color matching system. This year's color? Peach Fuzz!

Lunacy on LinkedIn.

Brian Johnson—one of the founders of BIPOC Design History,  Creative Director at Polymode, and a member of the Monacan Indian Nation — has spent years researching Indigenous design in an effort to help decolonize graphic design by speaking to the field’s racial biases. Links to his essays for Hyperallergic  (including the brilliantly-titled How Can a Poster Sing?) are here.

Bring Them Home is a documentary film that highlights a small group of Blackfoot people on their mission to establish—on their own ancestral territory—the first wild buffalo herd since the species’ near-extinction a century ago, an act that would restore the land, re-enliven traditional culture, and bring much-needed healing to their community. The film, directed by Blackfeet (Niitsitapi/ Siksikaitsitapi) siblings Ivan and Ivy MacDonald alongside filmmaker Daniel Glick, has just won a climate justice award.

What knots in our histories do we need to disentangle? What future relationships do we need to re-weave? Who and what is missing from the connections we make and unmake with our systems and technologies? Spend two days this month in Sweden at The Conference and "you’ll walk away with new mindsets and materials, teachings and tools, practices and parallels to help get us out of “oh fuck,” and into “now what?”  

There are only 75 Māori architects among New Zealand's roughly 2,000 licensed practitioners (and fewer than 10 Pacific Islanders), despite these Indigenous groups making up more than 25 per cent of the country's population—but Elisapeta Heta is one, and she's got something to say about this—and why it matters. "It's no wonder that our built environments don't necessarily reflect who we are as people," she observes. "There's no diversity in it because it's all been designed through the same Western lens."

Through his charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Michael Bloomberg is giving $175 million each to Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, and Howard University College of Medicine in Washington. These donations are believed to be the largest ever to any single H.B.C.U.

An indigenous design camp for teenagers is the first of its kind in the United States (or maybe anywhere). The goal is to teach Indigenous teens about the range of career options in architecture and design, a field where Native Americans are notably underrepresented.

The functional design elements of the new Michael Graves Design for Pottery Barn collection leverage ethnographic research across several communities, from those aging in place, to individuals with permanent, situational, or temporary disabilities, to those who are planning for the future without compromise, and those who want their homes to be welcoming to everybody, all without sacrificing good design.

“There is no doubt that domestic harmony is endangered by having a designer about,” Mr. Grange told The Daily Telegraph in 2012. “If you are good at your job you cannot avoid looking at everything and, given half a chance, affecting it. I even have an opinion about a tea towel — I just cannot help it.” British industrial designer (and Pentagram co-founder) Sir Kenneth Grange has died. He was 95. 

It's August! You may be heading out on that much-needed vacation! And how will you get there? Map lovers—and travelers all—rejoice! And look no further.

Did you know there is a way to dig in deep to stories about the Olympics that are design-focused? You do, now!

A design-focused conversation about coding, communication, and the beauty of simplicity.

TBD*—the  in-house design studio of the CCA in San Francisco—is looking for local nonprofit/civic partners needing design help this coming fall. Details here.

What does it mean to bestow a “good design” award in today’s design landscape—especially within the context of public space?

A logo conspiracy theory—about the Olympics?

The recent handoff from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris obliged the campaign's designers to launch a new Harris for President logo in just three hours: they also crafted an entire brand refresh—including ads and print collateral AND a website—all of which they built out in just over a day. More on this massive (and speedy) undertaking here.

Our friends at WXY Architecture and Jerome Haferd Studio are among four firms that have won a competition to design a series of cultural venues for historic Africatown in Alabama.

“Our mascot, Phryges, is based on the Phrygian hat, which is a powerful emblem in France on everything from coins to stamps. Phryges is gender-free, which feels appropriate because this is the society we live in. Toys should be for everyone, and not gendered.” An interview with Joachim Roncin, the designer of the Paris Olympics.

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) recently announced that it would eliminate the term “equity” from its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) language. “What organizations like SHRM may or may not realize is that abandoning the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion causes real harm and serious pain,” says Amira Barger. “By sidelining equity, SHRM’s move may unintentionally exacerbate something called ‘dirty pain.’”

“As a person who spent the first part of my career as a graphic designer and art director, I immediately saw the visual power and nearly infinite graphic possibilities of this image.” In today's New York Times, Charles Blow discusses the irrefutable power of an iconic photograph.

In New York City, The Design Trust for Public Space is looking for photographers with “unique lenses on an equitable water future for New York”. Deadline for entry is 11 August. More here.

One artist's (musical) cry for help—or at least, fewer fast-food franchises in North Adams, Massachusetts.

“My design philosophy is to make people happy and comfortable in their environment,” says the 83-year old Irish designer known simply by her first name—Clodagh. “Since I don’t know the rules, I can actually break them all the time.” 

Design for accessibility, blessedly, is on the minds of architects and builders all over the world. Given the fact that an estimated 15-20% of the population is neurodivergent, commercial buildings are increasingly working to become more welcoming, inclusive, and comfortable for all individuals.

“While designers are eager for praise and acclaim and create an aura of ostensibly cultured and intellectual pursuit, often involving awards and accolades, design itself takes no responsibility for what happens when things go wrong.” An excerpt from Manuel Lima's latest book.  



Jobs | October 03