Lunch With The Critics: Second-Annual Year-End Awards
How will 2011 be remembered in architectural history? A year in which the public reclaimed public space? The last hurrah of starchitectural extravagance? After long deliberation, Mark Lamster and Alexandra Lange offer you their awards for the year.
The Silver Star Award: Michael Kimmelman, for his conversation-shifting debut as The New York Times’s new sheriff in town. [ML]
Old[er] Dog, New Trick Award: Paul Goldberger, for his engaging engagement with the architectural masses on Twitter. [ML]
Best Impersonation of Jane Jacobs Award: @jane_jacobs, tweeting news on planning, neighborhoods and public space, and exploiting social media, just like her namesake would have done. [AL]
And many more, from Architect Barbie to Jeanne Gang, dead museums to shameless self-promotion by a building at Design Observer.
Year-End Awards: Architecture
I was already on the road (now snowed in in Vermont, with grandma, hot chocolate and plenty of cookies), but on Friday Mark Lamster and I handed out a few year-end awards.
A sampling:
Best Use of a Pritzker Prize: I.M. Pei scotches the fourth, 400-foot-tall Silver Tower proposed by NYU, suggesting only beloved elder statesmen of architecture have the power to slow the university’s spread. [AL]
Best Show: MoMA’s revelatory Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, curated by Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman. Honorable mention: Chaos & Classicism at the Guggenheim, America’s Mayor at the MCNY. [ML]
…
Bad for Women in Architecture Award: “Bits of the sandwich were falling out of her mouth as she spoke, in a husky voice.” From John Seabrook’s profile of Zaha Hadid in The New Yorker, “The Abstractionist.” [AL]
Good for Women in Architecture Award: SANAA, the Japanese firm led by Kazuyo Sejima and
Ryue Nishizawa, wins the Pritzker Prize. Can Denise Scott Brown get hers now too, please? [AL]
Read the rest here, with cameos by Bjarke Ingels, Frank Gehry, Mad Men and the late Raimund Abraham (see drawing above, from MoMA).
