Architectural criticism must account for the full range of a building’s affect and effects: social, functional, aesthetic, and contextual. Provenance matters. But Panero’s piece—with its defense of “elevated design”—is clearly also meant as riposte to the functionalist aesthetics that have dominated virtually all of the building’s critical coverage to date. The New Criterion’s flatulence over symmetry and coherence is not simply neocon nostalgia for the eternal verities; it reflects a more general impoverishment of critical interpretation.
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