Shaping The City

Shaping The City

We talk with architect Roger Lewis about a critic's role in keeping the public informed and designers honest.

Last week, pioneering architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable passed away at age 91. Across her long career, Huxtable used her pen to deliver scathing take-downs -- she once described the Kennedy Center as "a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried” -- and challenge designers to rethink their work. We talk with Roger Lewis about a critic's role in keeping the public informed, designers honest and where criticism fits into the feedback loop as public projects go through from imagination to fruition.

Guests

Roger Lewis

Architect; Columnist, "Shaping the City," Washington Post; and Professor Emeritus of Architecture, University of Maryland College Park

Roger Lewis: Cartoons About Design Criticism

Comments

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Kojo:

Congratulations for bringing architects such as Mr. Lewis to the program. I am saddened by the dearth of such concern for good design in the environment in the media. I am also appreciative of your conscious effort to bring forth such smart and complex subjects. I am an architect who suffers every day the poverty of good architecture in our culture. Fortunately my area has been greatly enriched by the addition of the United Therapeutics headquarters in Silver Spring. The building complex is a shining jewel in a desert of mediocrity.

Thu, 01/17/2013 - 5:20pm
The Kojo Nnamdi Show is produced by member-supported WAMU 88.5 in Washington DC.