Writing About Architecture

"Lange analyzes her key texts with great care and perceptiveness, and happily she is wide ranging in her taste... She understands that the purpose of writing about architecture is to build a constituency for better design, to help people see, to help them feel more agency over the built environment-and to help them take joy in architecture's great moments. She's good at doing that herself, and this book will help others do it, too." --- Paul Goldberger, The Architect's Newspaper "In Writing About Architecture, Lange recognizes the stakes inherent in the act of describing place. While she certainly is pushing writers, readers and her students to aim for clarity in criticism, Lange goes much further, arguing that architecture critics be invested intellectually and emotionally in the world that surrounds them. The iconic critics Lange celebrates enliven the spaces they write about - whether they love them or hate them. They notice things. They're steeped in history, in context and provenance. They take their time. They make the reader want to experience the spaces described." --- Allison Arieff, The New York Times "It's not only a delight to read - Jacobs' vivid 1961 description of the everyday ballet on Manhattan's Hudson Street alone is worth the $24.95 price of admission - but an instructive treatise on how great criticisms come to be." -- Architects + Artisans "Nothing short of miraculous.... 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." ---ArchNewsNow

Alexandra Lange is an architecture and design critic, journalist and historian. Her work has appeared in the Architect's Newspaper, Dwell, Icon, Metropolis, New York Magazine, and the New York Times. She teaches at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. She is co-author, with Jane Thompson, of the book Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes (Chronicle, 2010). She blogs weekly in the Observers Room at Design Observer on all things visual.