Paul Goldberger
Paul Goldberger
Paul Goldbergeris an American architectural critic and educator, and a Contributing Editor for Vanity Fair magazine. From 1997 to 2011 he was the Architecture Critic for The New Yorker where he wrote the magazine's celebrated "Sky Line" column. He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City. He was formerly Dean of the Parsons School of Design, a division of The New School. The Huffington Post has said that he...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
CountryUnited States of America
I don't usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren't yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn't look great as a model?
For most of the nineteen-seventies, the official route map of the New York City subway system was a beautiful thing.
It seems to me that the sad event of 9/11 has created a huge opportunity for the revitalization of lower Manhattan - new world class contemporary buildings, more open space and pedestrian connections, more sustainability, more culture and the rejuvenation of New York on the world stage again.
Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.
Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Atlanta: those are all cities that really didn't get big, didn't hit their stride until the 20th century.
New York grew up before the automobile. And even though it's full of cars, its shape and form didn't get created around the automobile.
I think it's necessary to evaluate a skyscraper at multiple scales, since that's how we experience it: from right next to it on the street to from across the river, as well as at all kinds of points in between. It's important to think of it as an element in a larger skyline, but also as an element in an immediate streetscape.
The taste of people with large bank accounts tends not to be on the cutting edge.
By any reasonable standard, Riverside Drive would be considered the best street in New York. Where else, after all, are there such views-not of a narrow river, as there is across town, but of one of the noblest rivers in the United States.
Wright's building made it socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim.
I try to do everything from thinking about big issues like how a building fits into the larger stream of architectural history to practical issues such as how it feels to navigate your way through its interior.
We identify New York with the great bridges and tunnels and roadways and subway system and so forth.
On New York subways in the 1980s: Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti.
A suburban mall turned vertical.