Criticism Now: Where next for writing on the city?

This panel discussion brings together five of the most prominent architecture critics and writers from across the US to discuss the evolving role and future direction of criticism today.

Critics of the built environment have become an endangered species. Countless column inches are devoted to film, TV, music, theatre and books, yet the one discipline that no-one can escape goes woefully under-scrutinised. Ever fewer newspapers and magazines employ architecture critics, while the internet is awash with sponsored content and regurgitated press releases. In an underfunded media landscape, PR companies increasingly control the message, blocking probing eyes from access, and dictating who gets to publish, and for whom. Has criticism lost its way? How can we restore its urgency, engage new audiences, hold power to account, and shine a spotlight on the forces that are shaping the built environment, for better and worse?

Speakers

• Mark Lamster, The Dallas Morning News, Loeb Fellow 2017
• Alexandra Lange, Bloomberg CityLab, Loeb Fellow 2014
• Thomas de Monchaux, New York Review of Architecture, n+1
• Anjulie Rao, Dwell, The Architect’s Newspaper, Chicago Review of Architecture
• Mimi Zeiger, Azure, Los Angeles Review of Architecture, Architectural Review
• Chaired by Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian, Loeb Fellow 2026

This event is a collaboration between the Loeb Fellowship, GSD, and MIT.

Speaker Bios and Selected Articles

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, a Loeb Fellow (2017) at the GSD, and author of the biography of Philip Johnson, “The Man in the Glass House” (Little Brown, 2018). His next book, “Welcome to Paradox City,” a critical examination of Dallas architecture, will be published in August by Deep Vellum. 

• “Keep Your Hands Off Dallas City Hall”

• “Plans to Abandon Dallas City Hall are a Tragic Farce”

• Dallas City Hall: Why the City’s Most Hated Building Might Be Its Greatest Masterpiece

Alexandra Lange is a journalist, design critic, author, and Loeb Fellow (2014) at the GSD. She received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and is the author of “Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall” (Bloomsbury USA, 2022) and “The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids” (Bloomsbury USA, 2018).

• Finnish-Style Baby Boxes Get a New York Twist

• Burned-Out Parents Need Better Public Spaces

• The Answer To Making Cities More Family-Friendly? Courtyards

Thomas de Monchaux is an architect and writer. He is the architecture critic for n+1, and essayist in residence for The New York Review of Architecture (NYRA). He was the inaugural recipient of the Winterhouse Award for Design Writing and Criticism, among other honors. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Log, and Vole Prochaine, a journal of animal rights. With Deborah Berke, he is the co-author of “Transform: Promising Places, Second Chances, and the Architecture of Transformational Change” (Monacelli Press, 2023), recording his ministry on behalf of radically adaptive reuse. He teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, in New York City where he currently lives. 

• The Great and the Good

• Frickrolled

• Notre-Dame and the Paradoxes of Historical Preservation

Anjulie Rao is a journalist and critic. Based in Chicago, much of her work is focused on issues in post-industrial cities, including housing, ‘revitalization’, and political change. Anjulie is a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an Adjunct faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago, and previously taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She was a columnist at ARCHITECT magazine, and her bylines can be found in Dwell, The Architect’s Newspaper,  The Architectural Review, The New York Review of Architecture, and Landscape Architecture Magazine, among others.

• The Millennials Who Ditched Cities During the Pandemic Would Like a Word

• Post-Katrina Gentrification in New Orleans Was a Warning

• Do Architectural Design Competitions Make a Difference?

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic and curator. She’s served as guest editor and editorial advisor to the Los Angeles Review of Architecture, co-curated the U.S. Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, is a MacDowell Fellow, and the recipient of L.A. Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism awards for art and design criticism.

• Letter from Pasadena: on the Los Angeles Wildfires

• West World

• Half of the Future Is Buried in the Past

Oliver Wainwright is the architecture critic of the Guardian and a Loeb Fellow (2026) at the GSD. He trained as an architect and worked at the Mayor of London’s Architecture and Urbanism Unit, OMA in Rotterdam, and Muf Architecture/Art in London. His first book, “Inside North Korea” (Taschen, 2018), saw his photographs exhibited internationally, from the International Center for Photography in New York, to Seoul City Hall.

• An eco obscenity: Norman Foster’s steroidal new skyscraper is an affront to the New York skyline

• ‘An unfinished Frankenstein’s monster’: the disastrous new Orange County Museum of Art

• Penthouses and poor doors: how Europe’s ‘biggest regeneration project’ fell flat

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