goldberger on 2 columbus circle

Paul Goldberger returns—in true, clueless form—to the pages of the New Yorker this week with a real doozy of a review of Allied Works' redo of 2 Columbus Circle. As you've no doubt heard me lament before, dear reader, it is unconscionable how a publication of such supposed critical esteem can contract someone as critically impotent as Paul Goldberger to be their in-house architectural authority. It's a travesty.

With regard to the new building, I haven't been inside yet, but I still stand by my earlier thoughts.

Link: "Hello, Columbus" by Paul Goldberger, in the New Yorker

goldberger, again

I FORGOT TO MENTION Paul Goldberger's equally strange review of Norman Foster's new Hearst Building in midtown Manhattan. Sure, the building's diagrid structure is certainly impressive, as is the effort to enhance the skyline of a city so inundated with generic highrise construction. But is Foster really the "Mozart of modernism"? Goldberger, as is usually the case, seems overly enthusiastic and hardly offers any critical reading of the project. Shouldn't the New Yorker, a magazine with such potent weekly political, literary, and cultural criticism, find an architectural critic who has something else to bring to the table, other than wide-eyed awe and fascination?

link: Triangulation: Norman Foster's thrilling addition to midtown Manhattan

goldberger: rouse as radical?

CHECK OUT THIS WEEK'S New Yorker for a (typically) strange piece by Paul Goldberger on the Disneyfied "festival marketplace" of Shanghai's Xintiandi district. I don't really understand his logic here, but it seems to me as if Goldberger is trying to say that that the recent fascination with Rouse-ian kitsch in Shanghai somehow has radical architectural implications for the city. Is it radical simply because it is a different urbanistic approach than the standard Shanghai development? Does that simple difference discount the enormous amount of cultural and symbolic baggage that these festival marketplace-like developments bring along with them? Maybe someone can help me here... am I missing something?

link: Paul Goldberger's Shanghai Surprise: The radical quaintness of the Xintiandi district