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
Everything he's produced is ultimately about Donald Trump, and we need a solution at Ground Zero that's going to be about New York, about America and about healing of the city -- and Trump I don't think is suited to that.
It fills one with a sense of architectural possibility.
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.
one of the best eyes that has existed in our time.
It's possible to rebuild some version of the original Twin Towers. But why would anyone want to? They were not particularly beloved buildings. They were powerful symbols.
It mixed the bulldoze-and-rebuild philosophy of urban renewal with the tentative beginnings of the historic preservation movement.
This great, glass-enclosed public space embraces a wonderful contradiction: it seems to call at once for a Boeing 747 and for a string quartet.
I think the challenge of Ground Zero goes beyond anyone's individual ego, and the problem of Donald Trump is he's never gone beyond his own individual ego.
It is something akin to boarding the Concorde and then discovering at the end of your trip that you had debarked at Grand Central Terminal.
His clarity and creativity are intimately intertwined. In his concise and brilliant way, he's able to say something that in someone else's hands is ordinary but in his becomes special and utterly clear.
In the first year, it looked as if we were really gonna aim for the highest thing possible. And then, gradually, sort of like the waves eating away at a sand castle, you know, they just wore away, bit by bit and it's gotten more and more ordinary.
Right after 9/11 it looked as if the idea of a huge skyscraper might be considered obsolete. It came back, but I think that's more closely connected to the rise of Asian and Middle Eastern cities in the world economy (Dubai, Shanghai, Taipei, etc.) than anything else.
I think of what the experience is of going into the building, of spending time in it, and try to get a sense of what the building would be like to work in as well.
New York remains what it has always been : a city of ebb and flow, a city of constant shifts of population and economics, a city of virtually no rest. It is harsh, dirty, and dangerous, it is whimsical and fanciful, it is beautiful and soaring - it is not one or another of these things but all of them, all at once, and to fail to accept this paradox is to deny the reality of city existence.