Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic, and author of Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities. (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). Her work has appeared in The Architect’s Newspaper, Architectural Record, Dwell, Metropolis, Print, New York Magazine and The New York Times.


































































03.26.12
‘Deco Japan’ + Designing Women
The Japan Society's new exhibition
"Deco Japan: Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945" displays the surprising globalism of this little-known period in Japanese design, when pent-up post-1923-earthquake desires for new goods and new traditions met up with a new openness to Western arts and the rise of industrialization




































































































09.28.10
Yummy!
I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibition
Appetite, curated by Alexander Tochilovsky at the Herb Lubalin Center at Cooper Union, not least because it was bite-sized.




09.26.10
Masdar: So Many Questions
I was not planning to post anything about 
Sukkah City. It all just looked like an architecture studio: so much effort, such worked-over results, and an inability to see the forest for the trees.




09.24.10
Rendering v. Reality in Sukkah City
I was not planning to post anything about
Sukkah City. It all just looked like an architecture studio: so much effort, such worked-over results, and an inability to see the forest for the trees.











09.08.10
In Dwell: Hands Off the Icons
In the 
October 2010 issue of Dwell, which celebrates the magazine’s tenth anniversary by revisiting its own (generally happy) homeowners, I offer the following Argument.




09.07.10
Coming to the V&A: Tower of Power
It is not often that 
a museum blogs about Postmodernism, Michael Sorkin (one of the great take-downs) and credits the (female) renderer who made the AT&T Building look the best it ever has.





08.30.10
Lunch with the Critics: Park51 and 15 Penn Plaza
In my 
second critical lunch with Mark Lamster, in the creepy climes of the Hotel Pennsylvania, we discuss the urbanism, politics and skyline posturing of Park51 and 15 Penn Plaza.

















07.27.10
On DO: Lunch with the Critics
Please weigh in on 
Mark Lamster and my new Design Observer feature, "Lunch with the Critics," in which we observe the new Lincoln Center.








07.20.10
Culture Shed: Where’s the Neighborhood?
CultureGrrl 
offers a critique of the NEA grant for Culture Shed, the Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group design for a Kunsthalle with retractable roofs over at Hudson Yards.





07.18.10
Hung Ceilings
Mad Men returns, and now it's time to speculate on the evolution of Peggy’s hair and the meaning of Betty’s dress choices




07.13.10
Time to Move On
A very nice 
house in Montauk embodies the most recent cliches in architecture: floating staircases, pocket doors, and glass floors.







07.06.10
Below Black Rock
While the plaza around the 
CBS Building in Manhattan has always seemed perverse, it is now made worse with the addition of a bank.




07.02.10
The Personality of Parks
Until Pier 6 at 
Brooklyn Bridge Park opened, my only experience of parks as a parent had been of neighborhood parks










06.17.10
Diana Center & Architectural Bull----
Though rave reviews (
Architect, Metropolis, previously New York) are rolling in for Weiss/Manfredi’s Diana Center at Barnard College, every review has praised two things that I quickly dismissed as the most basic architectural bullshit: the copper glass and the street-level transparency.







06.11.10
Op Art Eye Candy
I’m lucky that I get to live with a
Julian Stanczak painting, bought by my father-in-law in 1968, when Op Art was really something.




06.10.10
Pomo Time Machine
I’m writing more about
Warren Platner, my favorite terribly wonderful or wonderfully terrible architect.








06.02.10
Bloggers in the Archive
Geoff Manaugh’s announcement, on
BLDGBLOG, that he would be blogging from the CCA this summer irritated me, partly because the idea is not brand new.




05.27.10
The Plastics
This month’s
Vogue, which had several enraging features, is not yet fully online except for Blake Lively, bathing suits, clear plastic.






05.21.10
The Anti-Enthusiasts
Design Blogs: The Vacuum of Enthusiasm, my Design Observer manifesto on what the world of design on the internet needs, lives on in the comments.








05.14.10
It Was All Yellow
In 
Buying In, author Rob Walker avoids talking about the aesthetics of the Livestrong bracelet.




05.12.10
In Metropolis: The Visceralist
I spent a day and a half with
Peter Bohlin in deepest Pennsylvania and New York State, and was very impressed with his house projects and attitude toward design.






05.07.10
On Archpaper: Saccharine Design
My review of
Marcel Wanders’ exhibition Daydreams at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for The Architect’s Newspaper just went online and let’s just say I was not impressed.








05.02.10
What I Learned @dcritconference
The
D-Crit Conference is just a memory, so as a tribute to the afternoon presentations I saw, I offer a set of tangents.













04.15.10
All in the Execution
Ian Baldwin's review of The Grid Book calls out the coffee-table book format and it's middlebrow achievements.










04.03.10
Has the High Line Ruined Us?
I went to
Brooklyn Bridge Park on opening day in the pouring rain with stroller.






03.31.10
Moynihan on Design
At
tonight’s lecture at D-Crit, Casey Jones, director of design excellence and the arts for the U.S. General Services Administration, quoted from Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, written in 1962.




03.30.10
Texts Without Context
I keep thinking about Michiko Kakutani’s piece,
Texts Without Context, that begins the discussion of what is being lost to culture by the supremacy of the web.












03.16.10
Things of Beauty
Saul Bass matchbook covers are about the most beautiful things I have seen in some time.








03.08.10
Not A Learning Experience
The Privileges finally gives a real satire of almost-present day New York City, in which money is discussed and no one has to learn their lesson.






03.03.10
The (Architectural) Anthologist
After some digressions weird and
wonderful, the Nicholson Baker I loved from The Mezzanine and U and I and Room Temperature seems to be back, cranky and at sea and procrastinating.















02.03.10
In AN 02: As the Tide Turns
In MoMA’s 
Rising Currents exhibition, certain tropes of contemporary waterfront design immediately surfaced.

















01.13.10
The Yuck Factor
Watch
District 9 as a palate cleanser after the visual feast of Avatar.






01.07.10
On DO: Skating on the Edge of Taste
The American Restaurant in Kansas City, designed by Warren Platner, is subject of a long essay on that architect and interior designer’s career.




01.06.10
I Heart Huxtable
Ada Louise Huxtable is still the most knowledgeable, elegant, thoughtful critic out there.







12.31.09
Last Post of 2009: Interview, Casey Jones
I interviewed the GSA’s newish head of Design Excellence,
Casey Jones, earlier this month about the future of this government program to ensure better architecture for government buildings






12.21.09
Exciting Multi-Generational Moment
An essay and slideshow on the
design of James Joyce’s Ulysses by my mother, Martha Scotford, appears on Design Observer, where I was recently made a contributing writer.






















11.22.09
Another New York
Every time I get an issue of
New York Magazine lately I ask myself: is Adam Moss turning it into a men’s magazine?



















10.24.09
Petting Zoo
On Thursday I took my class on a field trip to
One Bryant Park, the sustainable skyscraper that is almost complete at the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue.























































































Observed


While human-centered design was once the pinnacle of progressive ambition, a tricky question now confronts us all: what about the rest of life? Working with John Thackara and Caterina Castiglioni, at the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano twenty international design students were asked to design an urban ecology tool, place, equipment, or experience, that would enhance the interdependence of all of life in practical ways. Their conclusions are diverse, inspiring, and powerful. (Read the full report here.)

Reports of discrimination (and a lawsuit) at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Native American graphic design: a primer.

Cheryl Holmes's next book documents the history of the question she has been asking for decades—where are the Black designers?— along with related questions that are urgent to the design profession: where did they originate, where have they been, and why haven't they been represented in design histories and canons? With a foreword by Crystal Williams, President of Rhode Island School of Design, HERE: Where the Black Designers Are will be published next fall by Princeton Architectural Press.

Can ballot design be deemed unconstitutional? More on the phenomenon known as "Ballot Siberia," where un-bracketed candidates often find themselves disadvantaged by being relegated to the end of the ballot.

Designing the Modern World—Lucy Johnston's new monograph celebrating the extraordinary range of British industrial designer (and Pentagram co-founder) Sir Kenneth Grange—is just out from our friends at Thames&Hudson. More here.

Good news to start your week: design jobs are in demand!

An interview with DB | BD Minisode cohost and The State of Black Design founder Omari Souza about his conference,  and another about his new book. (And a delightful conversation between Souza and Revision Path host Maurice Cherry here.) 

What happens when you let everyone have a hand in the way things should look and feel and perform—including the kids? An inspiring story about one school’s inclusive design efforts

Graphic designer Fred Troller forged a Swiss modernist path through corporate America in a career that spanned five decades. The Dutch-born, Troller—whose clients included, among others, IBM, Faber Castell, Hoffmann LaRoche, Champion International, and the New York Zoological Society—was also an educator, artist, and sculptor. Want more? Help our friends at Volume raise the funds they both need and deserve by supporting the publication of a Troller monograph here.

The Independence Institute is less a think tank than an action tank—and part of that action means rethinking how the framing of the US Constitution might benefit from some closer observation. In order to ensure election integrity for the foreseeable future, they propose a constitutional amendment restoring and reinforcing the Constitution’s original protections.

Design! Fintech! Discuss amongst yourselves!

The art (and design) of “traffic calming” is like language: it’s best when it is extremely clear and concise, eliminating the need for extra thinking on the receiving end. How bollards, arrows, and other design interventions on the street promote public safety for everyone. (If you really want to go down the design-and-traffic rabbit hole with us here, read about how speculative scenario mapping benefits from something called “digital twins”.)

Opening this week and running through next fall at Poster House in New York, a career retrospective for Dawn Baillie, whose posters for Silence of the Lambs, Little Miss Sunshine, and Dirty Dancing, among countless others, have helped shape our experience of cinema. In a field long-dominated by men, Bailie's posters span some thirty-five years, an achievement in itself. (The New York Times reviews it here.)

Can't make it to Austin for SXSW this year? In one discussion, a selection of designers, policymakers, scientists, and engineers sought identify creative solutions to bigger challenges. (The “design track” ends today, but you can catch up with all the highlights here.)

Should there be an Oscar for main title design?

Design contributes hugely to how we spend (okay, waste) time online. But does that mean that screen addiction is a moral imperative for designers? Liz Gorny weighs in, and Brazillian designer Lara Mendonça (who, and we love this, also self-identifies as a philosopher) shares some of her own pithy observations.

Oscar nominees, one poster at a time.

Ellen Mirojnick—the costume designer behind Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and Oppenheimer, for which she is 2024 Oscar nominee—shares some career highlights from forty years in film. (Bonus content: we kicked off Season Nine of The Design of Business  | The Business of Design with this conversation.)

Erleen Hatfield, of The Hatfield Group, is the engineer behind many innovative buildings, including the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home to the Atlanta Falcons, whose roof opens like a camera aperture to reveal the sky. Now, she's also one of the newly-minted AIA fellows, an honor awarded to architects—only 3% of their 98,000+ AIA members—who have made significant contributions to the profession.  

Anamorph, a new filmmaking and technology company co-founded by filmmaker Gary Hustwit (of Helvetica fame) and digital artist Brendan Dawes, wants to reshape the cinematic experience with a proprietary generative technology that can create films that are different every time they’re shown.

Viewers seem more concerned with Biden's rounded smartphone than with his policies. (We're not discussing the age of the man, here—just his phone!)

Claiming he is “not very good at design,” Riken Yamamoto, a 78-year old Japanese architect, wins the coveted Pritzger Prize. Notes the jury: "Yamamoto’s architecture serves both as background and foreground to everyday life, blurring boundaries between its public and private dimensions, and multiplying opportunities for people to meet spontaneously”.

Citizen outcry over Southwest's new cabin design—and in particular, it's new-and-improved-seats—may not be likely to  result in changes any time soon, but the comments (Ozempic seats!) are highly entertaining. (“Is there an option to just stand?”)

More than 50 years ago, a small group of design educators tried to decolonize design in Africa, hoping to teach African designers how to use research and design for their people and their nations by leveraging their own indigenous knowledge and local customs. While their pioneering effort was suppressed after a few short years by the colonial authorities, their approach to teaching design still resonates today: consider the story of François-X. N.I. Nsenga, an indigenous African designer who grew up in Belgian Rwanda and studied in British Kenya at Africa's first university-based design program. For more on the cultural history, design philosphy, and the "Europeanisation" of colonial Africa, you'll find a conversation with Nsenga in Gjoko Muratovski's book, Research for Designers: A Guide to Methods and Practice

At turns dystopian and delightful, the future of AI-based digital assistants seem poised to communicate through the “emotion and information display” of new constellations of hardware. (Including … orbs!) Like concept cars, they're not on the market just yet, but developmental efforts at more than a few telecoms suggest they're clearly on the horizon. More here.

Jha D Amazi, a principal and the director of the Public Memory and Memorials Lab for MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) Design Group, examines how spatializing memory can spark future collective action and provide a more accurate and diverse portrayal of our nation's complicated past. She gave this year’s annual Richard Saivetz ’69 Memorial Architectural Lecture at Brandeis last month, entitled, “Spatializing Memory”.

Self-proclaimed “geriatric starlet” and style icon Iris Apfel has died. She was 102.

“You know, you’ve got to try to sneak in a little bit of humanity,” observes Steve Matteson, the designer behind Aptos—Microsoft's new “default” font. “I did that by adding a little swing to the R and the double stacked g." Adds Jon Friedman, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for design: “It’s both quirky and creates a more natural feel that brings in some of the serif font ‘je ne sais quoi’ to it”. Resistant to change (or simply longing for Calibri), font geeks are not having it. Fun fact? Aptos was originally called Bierstadt. You may well imagine, as we did, that this was a nod to the 19th century German-American landscape painter, Albert Bierstadt—but the actual translation is “Beer City”. 

In Dallas, the Better Block Foundation is sponsoring a design contest called Creating Connections, aimed at addressing the growing epidemic of loneliness by exploring the impact of design on how people connect with others.



Jobs | March 19