Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Design of Childhood
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1970?
WEBSITE: http://www.alexandralange.net/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1970.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A., 1994; New York University, M.A., 2001, Ph.D., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Architecture and design critic. New York magazine, New York, NY, staff writer, 1994-99, contributing writer, 1999-2004, contributing editor, 2004-10; Design Observer, featured writer, 2009-13; Dezeen, opinion columnist 2014-15, Curbed, architecture critic, 2015-; School of Visual Arts, D-Crit Program teacher.
AWARDS:Harvard Graduate School of Design, Loeb Fellow, 2014.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Architect, Architectural Digest, Architectural Record, Architect’s Newspaper, Atlantic online, Cite, Domus, Domino, Dwell, GOOD, Icon, Metropolis, Nation, New Yorker, New York Magazine, New York Times, Places Journal, Print, and Slate.
SIDELIGHTS
Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic based in Brooklyn, New York. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in Architectural Record, New York magazine and New York Times. She is the architecture critic for Curbed, a columnist at Dezeen, and featured writer at Design Observer. Lange also teaches architecture criticism in the D-Crit Program at the School of Visual Arts, and was the recipient of a 2014 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Design Research and Writing About Architecture
In 2010, Lange teamed up with Jane Thompson to publish Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes. Ben Thompson opened the Design Research store in Boston in 1953 to bring modern interior design to the people, and to counter the mass-produced furniture of department stores. Even though the store no longer exists, Design Research’s influence can still be seen in places like Crate & Barrel and Design Within Reach. The authors provide interviews, anecdotes, and photographs of the legendary store.
In Lange’s 2012 Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, part of the “Architecture Briefs” series, she explains how to write effectively and critically about the contemporary city. She also includes essays and criticisms by some of the best architecture critics of the twentieth century, such as Ada Louise Huxtable, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, and Charles Moore, along with a close reading of the writings, her analysis, and contemporary examples. Norman Weinstein praised the book in a review on ArchNewsNow.com saying it “arrives at a propitious moment both for that endangered species, architectural critics, and for the objects of their critical scrutiny, architects. What Lange has accomplished in her book is nothing short of miraculous.”
The Dot-Com City and The Design of Childhood
Lange next published the 2014 The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism. In the book she investigates the private towns of Silicon Valley, explores the bland campuses of Apple, Google, and Facebook, and learns what these say about these mega corporations. Lange’s New Architecture New York, released in 2017, features some of New York City’s best new architecture projects, such as Bjarke Ingels Group’s VIA West 57, SHoP Architects’ Barclays Center, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s High Line, and SOM’s One World Trade Center.
In 2018, Lange wrote The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids, in which she reveals the histories behind children’s learning spaces and architecture, such as classrooms, playgrounds, and neighborhoods, which should contribute to children’s health, values, education, and behavior. Lange “powerfully remind[s] readers of the importance of constructing spaces that make all people, including children, feel both welcomed and independent,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. A Kirkus Reviews writer called the book “An informative road map for those who want to maximize their children’s material environment.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2018, review of The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids.
Publishers Weekly, March 5, 2018, review of The Design of Childhood, p. 66.
ONLINE
ArchNewsNow.com, http://www.archnewsnow.com/ (January 26, 2012), Norman Weinstein, review of Writing about Architecture.
Talking About "Writing About Architecture": A Conversation With Alexandra Lange
Apr 22, 2012
Architecture of PlacePlacemaking News
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Click to view the Table of Contents / Photo: Princeton Architectural Press
As Placemaking Blog readers already know, we're in the midst of launching a public conversation about the need for an Architecture of Place. In researching the current state of architectural criticism, we came across design critic Alexandra Lange's brand new book, Writing About Architecture, which serendipitously provides an in-depth look at how to write effectively about the very subject we were arguing needs to be written more effectively about!
Lange, who teaches criticism at New York University and the School of Visual Arts, has created a hybrid that is part anthology, part handbook. Writing About Architecture presents six essays by well-known critics, including Lewis Mumford, Michael Sorkin, and Jane Jacobs, using them to illustrate various aspects of successful and effective criticism. I recently had the opportunity to chat with the author via email about activist criticism, improving communication between citizens and designers, and how the democratization of media is opening up this field to new voices.
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Brendan Crain: You devote a good deal of ink in Writing About Architecture to activist criticism, focusing (necessarily) on specific examples. Thinking more broadly, what would you say is the state of activist criticism today? Can you think of people who are doing a particularly good job with this kind of writing? And if there are any, what are some of the broader goals of contemporary activist design criticism?
Alexandra Lange: In the last chapter of my book I discuss Jane Jacobs, and how she might have reacted to the Atlantic Yards project. I think it needed a Jane Jacobs to stop it -- an advocate as eloquent about the costs, and the alternatives, as those seductive Gehry renderings -- and for whatever reason, one did not appear. But the activist spirit was by no means dead. It just got diffused into activist non-profits and activist blogs and activist essays. The diffused media landscape made it easier to follow the saga week by week, but perhaps made it harder for any one person to become the voice.
Activist criticism now is less likely to be on the pages of a major media outlet and more likely to be on a purpose-built blog. Jane Jacobs and Michael Sorkin had the Village Voice; today, I think of Aaron Naparstek and Streetsblog, which he founded but has now become a larger, multi-writer entity. He built his own platform for what the New York Times would not cover. That's incredibly exciting but also potentially limiting -- what if you have activist thoughts about other topics? Preservation is another area where I think critics can be effective, but I wouldn't want to write about modernist preservation all the time.
In terms of broader goals, I can think of three areas that seem to attract activism: public space (like PPS), preservation (like DOCOMOMO, Landmarks West!) and transportation (Transportation Alternatives, Streetsblog). But more people get their news about the city from places like Curbed and other real estate blogs, and I am still always hoping that those sites will get more critical, and put their readership to use. It isn't really in their personality profile, but I'm an optimist.
BC: That raises the question of why, at a time when architecture is purportedly paying more attention to social issues, the audience for writing about it seems to be shrinking, with the "death of architecture criticism" meme making the blog-rounds over the past few months. Groups that are particularly well-organized online--bicycling advocates, urban gardeners, transportation wonks, and even real estate gawkers--seem to dominate the conversation about cities. Discussions about architecture seem much more insular. How might the conversation about the built environment be opened up to appeal to a wider audience?
AL: I'm not sure I think the "death of architecture criticism" meme is real. I am sad when publications that have longstanding critic positions decide they don't need them anymore, but I wonder if the real story isn't architecture criticism exploring the new media landscape. TV criticism went through a tremendous transition, embracing the recap, rejecting the recap, making a case for itself as the central cultural critique of our day. It could be amazing if architecture criticism made a similar transition and came out stronger.
For that to happen, I think criticism needs to take more forms: not just appear in the culture section, but in news and opinion; appear on Twitter, in conversations with other fields; point out how it is central to questions of development, and environmentalism, and even television, that people are already engaged with. Readers need to recognize that it doesn't have a single personality. Unfortunately, the first people critics need to convince are the editors, and I know from experience that can be tough.
BC: In addition to diversifying the ways in which critical writing is being disseminated, does the scope of what what's being written about need to widen? In the book, you've included "You Have to Pay for the Public Life," an essay by Charles Moore that contrasts architectural with social monumentality. You note that, by Moore's definition, a place as simple and unadorned as a meadow can be considered monument if that meadow resonates with the surrounding communities -- "people make monuments." Do you think writing about more ordinary elements of the city could be helpful in broadening the audience for criticism?
AL: Moore's essay is one of my all time favorites, and I constantly refer to it in my thinking about public space and the way we make cities. 'Who is paying' and 'How are we paying' are questions relevant to almost any public space. In that chapter I even review, in a sense, the Urban Meadow in my Brooklyn neighborhood as a monument. So yes, I do think critics need to widen their scope, but I also think people need to notice that they've already done that, and have been doing it. Justin Davidson has a piece in this week's New York magazine about Times Square, and he's written about it at least one other time. Michael Kimmelman is making the architects mad by writing about planning and not architecture for the Times. Karrie Jacobs has been doing this all along. There was a tendency to starchitecture criticism, but it wasn't forever and it wasn't everyone.
BC: Due to the technological changes that you spoke of earlier, it's easy now for anyone with an interest in architecture and design to participate in the public discussion about these topics. Blogging and tweeting are to media, in a way, what "Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper" interventions are to design. In the book, you refer to Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities as "a primary document for a ground-up, deinstitutionalized form of architectural criticism." Are there other books, essays, blogs, etc. that you think are particularly instructive for people who, like Jacobs, aren't trained as designers or architects, but who want to write about how design affects their communities?
AL: I like the approach Alissa Walker takes on her own blog, Gelatobaby, as well in her freelance work (she now has a column at LA Weekly). I like the kind of events the Design Trust for Public Space organizes, creating social interactions in unusual parts of the city. I think Kevin Lynch's Image of the City is well worth reading, even though it is dated, because his mental mapping project, and the five elements of the city he identifies (path, edge, district, node, landmark), remain useful in trying to figure out what's missing. If you want to read more Lewis Mumford, I recommend the collection From the Ground Up, which has a lot about cars, housing and streets. I just read an essay on architecture and urban development in Kazakhstan by Andrew Kovacs, soon to be published in PIDGIN, that I found fascinating. Sometimes just reading an account of what it is like to walk around in a strange place is enough, and that's a great place for the non-designer to start. Get out the AIA Guide and go explore.
BC: Getting out and observing how a place works is something we highly recommend! But sometimes people can sense things intuitively about a place that they may not be able to articulate in a way that design professionals respond to. We conducted one of our How to Turn a Place Around training workshops at the PPS offices in New York last week, and one of the attendees said that she was participating because she would like "for designers to think more like citizens, and for citizens to think more like designers." You've included a bunch of great exercises in Writing About Architecture to help readers put lessons learned from the various essays into action. Can you think of one or two exercises that could help citizens to communicate their concerns more effectively to designers--and vice versa?
AL: I think for the non-designer, getting specific is really helpful. Achieving a higher level of noticing. Do you always trip on that step? Why do you take the stairs rather than the ramp? Is it just too hot in the park? Think about the height, the materials, the lighting level, the plants and try to figure out what it is that isn't working. No one likes to hear, "I just don't like it..." and I think making the problem as concrete as you can helps designers to hear you. Also, if you are in a place that isn't working, try to think of a similar one that you do like. What does that one have that this one doesn't? Compare and contrast is really effective.
As for the designers, I'm with the anti-archispeak contingent. Architects have to get specific too, and not talk about landscape elements rather than plants, etc. It is a kind of shorthand, but it is off-putting. More important, though, is to discuss the narrative of a project: why you chose this material rather than that, how it is supposed to make citizens (not users!) feel and act, what's the point. Everyone wants places that work, but there are so many different ways to get there.
Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic whose essays, reviews, and features have appeared in design journals, New York magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Curbed, Design Observer, Dezeen, and many other publications. She received a PhD in twentieth-century architecture history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She is the author of Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism, and co-author of Design Research: The Story that Brought Modern Living to American Homes. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Alexandra Lange
Architecture Critic
Alexandra Lange writes the Critical Eye column for Curbed, covering design in many forms: new parks and Instagram playgrounds, teen urbanists and architectural icons, postmodernism and the post-retail era. Her latest book, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids, is being published by Bloomsbury USA in June 2018.
Alexandra was a 2014 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and received a publication grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for her new book. She has taught design criticism at the School of Visual Arts and New York University, and also wrote the book on it: Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012).
Alexandra lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Introducing Alexandra Lange as Curbed Architecture Critic
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By Kelsey Keith Apr 22, 2015, 5:00pm EDT
We're pleased as punch to announce that as of this week, design critic Alexandra Lange is joining Curbed to write a monthly architecture column. Combining the street-friendly perspective of Ada Louise Huxtable with the critical commentary of peers like Justin Davidson and Michael Kimmelman, Lange has crafted a freelance career that combines deep research with an incisive viewpoint on all things design. "Curbed has always practiced a form of architecture criticism," Lange says, pointing out recurring features like Rendering vs. Reality and the sites' aptitude in coining nicknames "for the latest mountains, blots and ripples to descend upon our cities."
"I think I share that irreverence but add context, experience, and the dorky-but-necessary dream that architecture can make cities better for everyone," she says. "Architecture criticism has already outgrown the old model of one city-one newspaper-one critic, and I look forward to exploring what being a critic for the floating digital world can mean."
Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic whose essays, reviews, and features have appeared in Architect, Domus, Dwell, Metropolis, New York Magazine, the New Yorker blog, and the New York Times and T magazine. She taught architecture criticism in the Design Criticism Program at the School of Visual Arts and the Urban Design & Architecture Studies Program at New York University. During academic year 2013–2014 she was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Lange is the author of Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), a primer on how to read and write architecture criticism, as well as the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism (Strelka Press, 2012), which considers the message of the physical spaces of Facebook, Google, and Apple. She has long been interested in the creation of domestic life, a theme running through Design Research: The Store that Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle Books, 2010), which she co-authored with Jane Thompson, as well as her contributions to Formica Forever (Metropolis Books, 2013) and Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (Yale University Press, 2006).
Last but not least, she's appeared on Curbed, with a contribution to a feature chronicling critics' first apartments in New York City. Follow her on Twitter at @LangeAlexandra, and stay tuned for Lange's first column appearing right here on Thursday, April 23.
· All Alexandra Lange coverage [Curbed]
· Alexandra Lange
· @LangeAlexandra [Twitter]
· Archicritics Reveal The Seamy Details Of Their First Rentals [Curbed NY]
Alexandra Lange is the architecture critic for Curbed. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in numerous design publications including Architect, Domus, Dwell, and Metropolis, as well as in New York Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. She has been a featured writer at Design Observer and an Opinion columnist at Dezeen. She has taught design criticism at the School of Visual Arts and New York University. She was a 2014 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Her new book, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids will be published by Bloomsbury USA in June 2018. Research for the book was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. She is also the author of Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), a primer on how to read and write architecture criticism, as well as the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism (Strelka Press, 2012), which considers the message of the physical spaces of Facebook, Google, and Apple.
She has long been interested in the creation of modern domestic life, a theme running through Design Research: The Store that Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle Books, 2010), which she co-authored with Jane Thompson, as well as her contributions to Alexander Girard: A Designer’s Universe (Vitra, 2016), Formica Forever (Metropolis Books, 2013) and Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (Yale University Press, 2006). She contributed a chapter titled “Toys As Furniture, Furniture As Toys” to the forthcoming catalog Serious Play: Design in Midcentury America (Yale University Press, 2018), which will accompany an exhibition at the Milwaukee and Denver Art Museums.
Lange has lectured widely at universities, museums and design conferences, on topics ranging from the history of women architecture critics to the opulent modernism of Alexander Girard to the proper use of social media by architects. Her 2005 dissertation, “Tower Typewriter and Trademark: Architects, Designers and the Corporate Utopia, 1956-1964,” discussed the design programs and design networks at postwar American corporations.
Alexandra Lange www.alexandralange.net alexandra.lange@gmail.com 917–371–7776 Education 2013–2014 Graduate School of Design, Harvard University Loeb Fellowship 2005 Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Ph.D., May 2005 (M.A., January 2001) “Tower Typewriter and Trademark: Architects, Designers and the Corporate Utopia, 1956-1964” 1994 Yale University B.A., Architecture and Literature: cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, distinction in both majors Editorial Experience since 2015 Curbed (curbed.com), Architecture Critic 2014–2015 Dezeen (dezeen.com), Opinion Columnist 2009–2013 Design Observer (designobserver.com), Featured Writer 2004–2010 New York magazine, Contributing Editor 1999–2004 —, Contributing Writer 1994–1999 —, Staff Freelance Architect; Architectural Digest; Architectural Record; The Architect’s Newspaper; The Atlantic online; Cite; Domus; Domino; Dwell; GOOD; Icon; Metropolis; The Nation; New York magazine; New York Times; The New Yorker; Places Journal; Print; Slate. Books The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids, New York: Bloomsbury USA (forthcoming 2018). “Toys as Furniture / Furniture as Toys,” Serious Play, New Haven: Yale University Press (forthcoming 2018). “Alexander Girard in Columbus,” Alexander Girard: A Designer’s Universe, Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2016. “Stitching A House,” Listening: Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Houses 2009 – 2015, New York: Rizzoli, 2015. “Preface,” Duke University: An Architectural Tour, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015. “2004 – 2008,” Thirty Years of Emerging Voices: Idea, Form, Resonance, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015. “The Glamour of Utility,” Formica Forever, New York: Metropolis Books, 2013. The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism, Moscow: Strelka Press [E-book], 2012.
Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012. With Jane Thompson, Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2010. “’I Can’t Live in a Box’: Artists, activism and lower Manhattan in the 1960s,” in New York Cool: Paintings and Sculptures from the NYU Collection, ed. Pepe Karmel, New York: NYU, 2009. “Corporate Headquarters: Saarinen in Suburbia,” and with Sean Khorsandi, “Houses and Housing: At Home with Saarinen,” in Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, ed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Donald Albrecht, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. (Winner, 2007 SAH Philip Johnson Book Award; 2007 Sir Banister Fletcher Award.) Selected Journalism “The A-Frame Effect, Curbed, September 22, 2017. “A Graphic Novel Turns Teens into City Planners,” The New Yorker, August 19, 2017. “Jane Jacobs, Georgia O’Keeffe, and the Power of the Marimekko Dress, The New Yorker, June 23, 2017. “The forgotten history of Japanese-American designers’ internment,” Curbed, January 31, 2017. “What It Would Take to Set American Kids Free,” The New Yorker, November 18, 2016. “10 Things I Learned at the Vanna Venturi House,” Curbed, November 17, 2016. “Jane Jacobs Was No Upstart,” Architect, October 4, 2016. “Play Ground,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2016. “A Buffalo Case Study: Can Architecture Bring a City Back?” Curbed, August 6, 2015. “Women were unwelcome in architecture, but male architects couldn’t live without them,” Dezeen Opinion, May 12, 2015. “Pier 55: Pocket Gadget, Meme-tecture, or Something More Nefarious?” Curbed, April 23, 2015. “Philip Johnson’s Not Glass Houses,” T Magazine, February 15, 2015. “Why Charles Moore (Still) Matters,” Metropolis, June 2014. “Demolition of Prentice Women’s Hospital and Penn Station,” Architect, November 2013. “Architecture’s Lean-In Moment,” on the status of women in architecture, Metropolis, July/August 2013. “Dreams Built and Broken: On Ada Louise Huxtable,” The Nation, May 6, 2013. “Founding Mother: Mariana Van Rensselaer and the Rise of Criticism,” Places, February 25, 2013. “Fear of Fun: A History of Modernist Design for Children,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 6, 2012.
Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Architectural Record, Dwell, Print, New York Magazine and The New York Times. She is the author of Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). She is co-author, with Jane Thompson, of Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle, 2010). She teaches architecture criticism in the D-Crit Program at the School of Visual Arts.
The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids
Publishers Weekly. 265.10 (Mar. 5, 2018): p66+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids
Alexandra Lange. Bloomsbury, $28 (416p)
ISBN 978-1-63286-635-6
Architectural historian Lange (Writing About Architecture) skillfully explores how the design of children's toys and built environments reflects evolving philosophies of child-rearing and development. Lange begins by discussing how children learn through building toys like standarized wooden "unit blocks," introduced in the early 20th century; their more adaptable successor, Lego; and today's digital alternative, Minecraft. The construction of high chairs, school desks, and playgrounds, meanwhile, reveals shifting value judgments by parents and educators about the balance between participation, freedom, and safety. Lange contrasts the suburban model of the home as primary play space with modern city designs that aim to allow children to play freely near their homes. When money is not made available to update spaces in lower-income areas, she warns, those communities can suffer. The book also tracks the design of classrooms and schools over the course of American history, from the earliest one-room schoolhouses; through the fixed-desk rows of the late 19th century, when reformers began introducing compulsory education; to today's open-plan layouts. Never attempting the role of parenting guru or educator, Lange is not prescriptive, but does powerfully remind readers of the importance of constructing spaces that make all people, including children, feel both welcomed and independent. B&w photos. Agency: Phyillis Wender, Gersh Agency. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids." Publishers Weekly, 5 Mar. 2018, p. 66+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530430330/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fcf644ac. Accessed 6 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530430330
Lange, Alexandra: THE DESIGN OF CHILDHOOD
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lange, Alexandra THE DESIGN OF CHILDHOOD Bloomsbury (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 6, 12 ISBN: 978-1-63286-635-6
An informative road map for those who want to maximize their children's material environment.
When architecture critic Lange (The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism, 2014, etc.) had her first child, she "came to see each successive stage of childhood development as an opportunity for encounters with larger and more complex environments." Her approach is primarily historical and design-focused as she explores five specific topics that make up the "designed-for-childhood environment": blocks, house, school, playground, and city. Corrugated cardboard boxes appeared in the 1870s, and children quickly saw their appeal as playthings. Wooden beads and blocks gained popularity around 1900. Blocks designed by Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten, became popular when Milton Bradley began manufacturing them in the 1870s. Lange then traces the development and sophistication of blocks from the Danish LEGO (leg godt or "play well") to "Minecraft" to Zoob, each crucial to stimulating children's imaginations. Next up is house; as the author writes, children "need furnishings couched to their frames but also to their abilities." The high chair dawned in the 1830s, followed by kid-size dishes. In 1929, Parents magazine featured the "Whole-Family House." Lange teaches us about Maria Montessori, the "magic of the storage wall," and the significance of Peter Opsvik's multipurpose Tripp Trapp chair. School focuses on how "pedagogy and architecture go hand in hand." The first spaces in America called "play grounds" were created in Boston in 1885 out of piles of sand, and the first jungle gym was installed in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1920. Lange argues that "segregating children's play from the flow of urban life creates its own problems." She hands out A ratings to cities (Rotterdam, Oslo, Seattle) who are redesigning city spaces in terms of children's welfare. Disneyland gets an A-plus for its exemplary "child-friendly outdoor environment."
Parents and educators will discover a wealth of information to inspire and help "make childhood a better place."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lange, Alexandra: THE DESIGN OF CHILDHOOD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700372/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e12e5832. Accessed 6 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700372
Book Review: How to be a Useful Architectural Critic: Alexandra Lange's Perspicacious Primer Points the Way
"Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities" - use it often and you'll never think of the word "critic" pejoratively again.
By Norman Weinstein
January 26, 2012
As many architects struggle to eek out a decent living in these lean times, you might well think a book about how to be an effective architectural critic a frothy irreverence. After all, the number of nationally recognized architecture critics who make even a meager living doing their calling barely exceeds a few dozen. And unlike architects who can anticipate an economic upturn, the rise of the Internet has guaranteed that future architecture critics, now informal groups of hundreds crafting blogs, will earn nothing for their labor in any economic climate. Yet I’m interrupting this bleak line of thought to assert that Alexandra Lange’s Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities arrives at a propitious moment both for that endangered species, architectural critics, and for the objects of their critical scrutiny, architects.
What Lange has accomplished in her book is nothing short of miraculous. She showcases six essays by Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles W. Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Each “star” critic’s essay is then astutely analyzed through incisive quotes from their peers – Ada Louise Huxtable enters stage left quite often, Paul Goldberger stage right – and then critically analyzed by Lange, who brings to her work the multiple hats of working architect, journalist, and educator. Following each of the book’s six chapters is a list of provocative questions. They were likely generated in her interactions with her graduate students, but only a fool would refuse engagement with them. Lange’s chapter headings indicate the breadth and depth of her interest in writing about architecture: Skyscrapers, Museums, Landmarks, Monuments, Parks, and Cities. Note the intensive emphasis on the public and commercial. Perhaps Lange assumes writing usefully about the mansions of the rich and famous is best left to students of feature stories in Architectural Digest? Then again, that might be the apt text.
So who might the audience for Lange’s book be? It would be an ideal textbook for any student worldwide in a program promising a Masters of Fine Arts in Design Writing. We may be talking a few hundred students here. Not discounting scattered bunches of MFA students, I’m claiming that working architects (that phrase lassos the unemployed also) comprise the best possible audience for Lange’s book. Alas, they might also be the least likely to read it. But here is an argument for why they need to read this. Too often architectural critics find themselves in an adversarial relationship with architects. Either that, or just as horrid, they become sycophants, fans, marketing scribes. When dozens of architecture critics were firmly fixed in the security of daily newspaper positions, their opinions carried heft with a large portion of their general public over the long haul. Naysayers or affirmation asses, architecture critics dispensed opinions about completed architectural projects, with occasional forays into architectural plans for major projects. But opinions are not necessarily vehicles carrying useful perceptions.
Why does any working architect need an opinion about his or her output from an architecture critic? Why, apart from the obvious need for ego expansion or contraction, bottom line profit or loss, depending on a particular critic’s prestigious position? Where Lange appears to go with her book is in the direction of architecture critic as designer’s ongoing mentor, a second discerning eye. At their best, architecture critics ask necessary questions of architects that colleagues and friends dare not ask, having too much to lose in potentially embarrassing confrontations. As Lange brilliantly demonstrates in her cogent analysis of Michael Sorkin’s “Save the Whitney,” rather then opinion dispensing, she recognizes the political, ethical, and pedagogical imperatives, and need for compelling narrative, driving Sorkin’s perceptively useful criticism:
“Sorkin saw architecture as much as a game as an art form, a position bolstered by the fact that he began writing during a recession. Many of his Voice reviews. . .discuss buildings unbuilt, exhibitions shown, controversies engaged, rather than specific three-dimensional works of architecture. Yet Sorkin was and is a practicing architect, and when he turned to the building form, he could be lyrical and highly specific about the experience and effects of being there.”
Sorkin’s criticism, as Lange illuminates it, works simultaneously as imaginative play akin to preliminary design sketching, problem-seeking, and as a precise engagement with a specific site, materials, program, and design plan, synthesized to offer an architectural experience, an engagingly imaginative story aligned with client desires and occasionally public need.
One major irony of architecture education? Faculties don’t regularly undergo rigorous crits of their own designs and writing by their colleagues and students. If they did – and I don’t anticipate this democratic revolution in the near future – they would learn to recognize and cultivate their inner architecture critic. They would write perceptively about the rationale for their designs in a parlance other than hermetic theory-speak or self-aggrandizing marketing jargon. Lange’s book goes into the “nuts-and bolts” level of wordsmithing architectural experiences with a poetic lyricism and technical precision as no book before it. Use it often and you’ll never think of the word “critic” pejoratively again.
Norman Weinstein writes about architecture and design for Architectural Record, and is the author of “Words That Build” – an exclusive 21-part series published by ArchNewsNow.com – that focuses on the overlooked foundations of architecture: oral and written communication. He consults with architects and engineers interested in communicating more profitably; his webinars are available from ExecSense. He can be reached at nweinstein@q.com.