Few practitioners of criticism meant to be critics. Criticism happened to them, through a combination of luck and outrage, at moments in cities when building outstripped sense. There are strong parallels between the architecture of the late 1950s, when Huxtable began her career as critic, and the building boom of the early 21st century. In both cases a certain amount of bedazzlement prevailed as glittering towers replaced brick-and-stucco neighborhoods. There were (and are) great pieces of architecture, but the speed of construction also fostered a culture of knock-offs — good ideas repeated in inhospitable places or with subpar materials.

Huxtable started her career as an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s. She received a Fulbright in 1950 to study modern architecture in Italy and subsequently wrote a book on architect and engineer Pier Luigi Nervi. As one of few trained historians of the modern movement, she noticed gaps in the New York Times’s architecture coverage. Her sense of connoisseurship, distinguishing the best from the second-rate, served her from the very beginning of her career. In 1959 she wrote the Times editors a long letter in response to their positive review of a photography show on a modernist housing project in Caracas, Venezuela. Apparently, it looked great, but Huxtable had been there and had seen that the beautiful buildings did not work for their inhabitants. Her letter (printed in full) showed knowledge, passion and a critical voice, and the paper hired her.

In 1963 Huxtable became the Times’s first architecture critic. She held that position, with variations in title, until 1982 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970. What is charming and replicable about her first ten years as reviewer is the immediacy of her experience of so many great works of modern architecture: the Whitney Museum, the CBS Building, the glass canyons of Park Avenue, the marble plazas of Lincoln Center. Reading her pieces (collected in the wonderfully and evocatively named Kicked A Building Lately? and Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?), it is clear that her first loyalty is to the citizens of New York — and that she thinks they deserve better.

Before she does anything else in “Sometimes We Do It Right,” Huxtable describes what she sees. This may seem rather simplistic, but it is a step many critics skip today, since most reviews come with a photograph or slideshow. These writers want to leap over the visual to get to larger concerns: the architect’s genius, the international trend at work, the latent theory in the practice. Huxtable gives the reader explicit directions about where to stand and candidly states what she notices, offering immediate insight into reading a building or the city. First, you have to be there. Critiquing renderings is often a necessity, but you cannot discern what works unless you have seen it, touched it, and experienced it in person....

Her words are active, giving the architecture a sense of movement — powerful play, gleaming, stony — that allows a reader to feel what she feels for a moment. Most buildings do not move, but they have impact, and transmitting that impact verbally can fire the imaginations of people who might just have walked on by. These adjectives give a taste of the rhetorical explosion to come in the writings of Herbert Muschamp, the Times’s architecture critic from 1992 to 2004. Huxtable has always been more reserved, but she manages to give buildings personality through well-chosen descriptors....

Happenstance, accretion, a change in neighbors can combine to create new beauty at any moment. The critic would not be doing her job if she did not think today could be as good as the past. And Huxtable, deeply involved in the preservation movement in New York City, would not be doing her job if she did not recognize the qualities of older buildings as well as the latest ones....

“Sometimes We Do It Right” includes a number of features that I would urge citizen critics to use in their own writing. One, description: She sets the scene, and her theme, through opening paragraphs that bring the city vividly to mind. Two, history: She demonstrates that the skyscraper is not something new (via her neighborhood tour) and that Marine Midland is part of a lineage (via her discussion of curtain walls). These glancing references establish her expertise (she knows more about this topic than most) and also sidestep a common problem: a gee-whiz awe at the latest and greatest model in the line. Three, drama: Many people consider architecture boring. The first line of defense against this charge is making the connection for the reader between how architecture looks and how it makes one feel. It’s not just a building but a speaking artifact. Finally, the Point: Huxtable has 1200 words with which to make her point. When you read her review, you feel at all times that she knows exactly where it is going. She has chosen the three areas she wants to highlight — the surroundings, the plaza, the building’s skin — and she makes them with all deliberate speed. (If you have selected a theme and a mode of organization, and if you know what your critical approach is, having a point shouldn’t be hard. Leave out more than you leave in.)

Huxtable’s modest, carefully articulated rallying cry is left to the end: “Space is meaningless without scale, containment, boundaries and direction. ... This is planning. It is the opposite of non-planning, or the normal patterns of New York development. See and savor it now, because it is carelessly disposed of.” Her method is developmental, leading the reader to agreement rather than telling them what they will learn at the outset. Huxtable is asking us to look at what is around the architecture as much as the building in question, calling our attention to what is really important to get right.

“The X just means we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he adds. This is the spirit of experimentation behind Studio-X, an ambitious global educational initiative currently underway at GSAPP. Equal parts learning space, public forum, and international think tank, Studio-X “affords an enormous bandwidth for thinking about the future of cities,” Wigley says—a mandate that he cites as the core mission of the program, and the reason he first proposed it four years ago... With sister offices now open in Mumbai, Amman, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro, and more in the offing in South Africa and Japan, Studio-X New York is one spoke in a wheel of architectural activity that is at once international and intensely localized. The overseas branches aren’t intended to be subordinate to either Columbia or the Manhattan pilot office—“not like Starbucks selling some sort of wisdom from New York,” as Wigley puts it. They’re idea incubators in their own right, feeding new knowledge about how cities live and change into a greater community of thought... “It’s about expanding the notion of the university beyond the institution itself,” explains Jeffrey Johnson, the director of the New York–based China Megacities Lab, who has led groups of students on semiannual visits to Studio-X Beijing since it opened in 2009... Situated, like the New York studio, in the very heart of their respective downtowns, each Studio-X satellite operates as a discrete unit, with local directors setting a specific agenda. Yet all of the outposts, following the program’s mission, look to reinvigorate the urban conversation in their particular cities by engaging not just designers but culturally omnivrous thinkers from diverse backgrounds... Gavin Browning, who preceded Twilley and Manaugh at Studio-X New York, admits that the two halves of the Studio-X population are often “operating in separate spheres.”... The space’s social character is part of its appeal. “The potential for the contact there to be informal allows for discussions to take place that don’t take place in a more official setting,” says Jeffrey Inaba, the head of C-Lab, another fixture of Studio-X New York... And then there is the question of how the overseas locales are meant to work in concert with one another, as well as with the university. When they’re not being visited by one of the American student groups (which is to say, the majority of the year), the far-flung outposts operate entirely independently of Columbia. Although that gives them considerable leeway to chart their own course, it reduces the overall coherence of the program. “We all have access to each others’ planning calendars,” says Twilley, referring to her fellow Studio-X directors, “and I check what they’re up to.
But we haven’t translated that information into a coordinated series.”... Some of Studio-X’s satellites are located in places where certain political issues, the kind of things that might be spoken about freely on the campus of Columbia University, simply cannot be addressed. Wigley, who also sees the program as a vehicle for bringing corporate figures into architectural conversations, believes there’s room for healthy debate, but he tends to downplay the potential for outright conflict.

Via Google Translate: "EXPERIMENTAL SPACE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING: The EECS invites visitors to take ownership of this space that promotes the active construction of communities, through various strategies that encourage socialization and construction of knowledge. Learn the different materials and dynamics that take place in this space and help to lead processes of research, reflection and questioning. / CONVERSATION: Conversations around the MUAC exhibitions with artists, curators and specialists in various fields of knowledge and art, in which the general public can take a seat at the table and enrich the discussion, not only through questions but present situations and concepts. Consultation events. // AREA OF OWNERSHIP: Visitors can be expressed through various media, where their views are reflected and reading open to all visitors. Also, the general public can conduct a conversation on issues, concerns and knowledge of their own, arising from the visit to the museum and the EECS. Participate in your next visit to the museum. // STOCK BUILDING: The EECS invites visitors to build a public record with materials donated by them, to share references, visual or hearing that echoed from the processes of reflection caused by the exhibition and documentary material found in the space itself .

"During its war with the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan government restricted fuel, medicines and food items reaching the north and east of Sri Lanka. Even newsprint essential for printing newspapers came under the bans. The embargoes reached their peak during the 1990s.

Jaffna's newspapermen had to overcome scarcity to publish news of bombs and deaths."

"I doubt that the growth of speculative realism would have been so insistent without these communities scattered all over the world, or so rapid. 1) they are a key preserve of particular communities like postgrads + early career researchers, not least because so much activity can go on below the radar, outside the attention of the kind of journals'/institutions' disciplinary policing. 2) they are a means for established figures to communicate in a different + more immediate register + often to become more prominent more quickly. 3) they are a much easier means of importing material from other disciplines, in ways which might be frowned upon if the material was to appear in formal outlets. 4) they allow all manner of researchers to communicate with each other, establish rdg groups; there is real debate. 5) new material reaches an audience much more rapidly than it would through the normal means of communication."

"If urban history can be applied to virtual space and the evolution of the Web, the unruly and twisted message boards are Jane Jacobs. They were built for people, and without much regard to profit. How else do you get crowds of not especially lucrative demographics like flashlight buffs (candlepowerforums.com), feminists (bust.com) and jazz aficionados (forums.allaboutjazz.com)? By contrast, the Web 2.0 juggernauts like Facebook and YouTube are driven by metrics and supported by ads and data mining. They’re networks, and super-fast — but not communities, which are inefficient, emotive and comfortable. Facebook — with its clean lines and social expressways — is Robert Moses par excellence."

"The talking statues of Rome (or the Congregation of Wits) provided an outlet for a form of anonymous political expression in Rome. Criticisms in the form of poems or witticisms were posted on well-known statues in Rome. It began in the 16th century and continues to the present day.

The first talking statue was that of Pasquino, a damaged piece of sculpture on a small piazza. In modern times the weathered fragment has been identified as representing the mythical king of Sparta, Menelaus, husband of Helen of Troy, and a major character in the Iliad, holding the body of Patroclus. In 1501, the statue was found during road construction and set up in the piazza; soon after small poems or epigrams critical of religious and civil authorities began to be posted on it."

"What’s at stake here is more than access to a room full of books. The modern American public library is reading room, book lender, video rental outlet, internet café, town hall, concert venue, youth activity center, research archive, history museum, art gallery, homeless day shelter, office suite, coffeeshop, seniors’ clubhouse and romantic hideaway rolled into one. [1] In small towns of the American West, it is also the post office and the backdrop of the local gun range. These are functions that the digital public libraries of the future will never be able to recreate.

Since 1994, Robert Dawson has surveyed hundreds of the more than 17,000 public libraries in the United States... Dawson’s photographs make the case for the public library as an American Commons, perhaps the greatest we’ve ever had."

"The Internet is great at facilitating bonds among compatriots who wouldn’t otherwise feel comfortable communicating openly and assembling a critical mass. But this concentration of like-minded people still exists in a silo, and the uninitiated might never find the hyperlink that leads them in. It takes physical space to connect revolutionary passions with daily life and, more important, the broader population. When citizens unite in a square, a park, or along a scenic beachfront to demand reform, it creates an impossible-to-ignore spectacle that draws the attention of anyone nearby, not to mention those watching at home....

...public spaces surrounding Umayyad Mosque in Damascus...In Bahrain, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has gone so far as to bulldoze the 300-foot monument at the center of Manama’s Pearl Square, hoping that might defuse the revolutionary yearnings...Libya’s rebels, meanwhile, have their strip of shoreline in Benghazi..."

""Why from a design angle was it so successful as a point of protest?" Twenty-three streets lead to different parts of it, which is why it was so successful with the demonstrators. There isn't one big boulevard that you can block off, and there are two bridges that lead to it as well. One of them saw a clash between the regime and the demonstrators. It's also the case that all of downtown Cairo, which isn't that big, has a street that leads to side or another of Tahrir Square."

"The January 25th Revolution has had a dramatic, immediate effect on how Egyptians occupy Cairo and interact with one another. Commentators in the West have been quick to credit online social networking with empowering the protests. But the revolution that started in January 2011 in Cairo has provided powerful evidence that the virtual is not enough: in the course of several historic days in Tahrir Square it became decisively clear that the occupation of physical urban space was, and continues to be, crucial to the success and continuity of the revolution. Indeed, in the past few weeks Tahrir has became a truly public square. Before it was merely a big and busy traffic circle — and again, its limitations were the result of political design, of policies that not only discouraged but also prohibited public assembly.... over the years the state deployed the physical design of urban space as one of its chief means of discouraging democracy. "

"As the revolution in Egypt has unfolded, much attention has been paid to the significance of Facebook and Twitter as organizing platforms for the revolutionaries. Indeed, the Mubarak government shut down the Internet over the past few weeks to limit communications, a move that proved futile in either suppressing the uprising or prolonging his rule.

Of equal, if not greater, importance has been the platform (a word that once referred to something exclusively physical) provided by Tahrir Square in central Cairo, the geographic epicenter of the revolt. The breathless images of men and women, young and old, civilian and military, galvanizers and galvanized, together setting up encampments and protests in Tahrir Square, also known as Liberation Square, give us faith not only in humanity’s common right to assemble but our common expectation that cities, by definition, must provide ever-restless places of assembly"

"Joseph Grima and I were already talking about working together when he received a call from Richard Flood at the New Museum who was beginning the curatorial process for “The Last Newspaper.” Joseph and I were talking about how in the 1960s, artists and thinkers connected to obsolete practices in order to re-imagine contemporary possibilities. Newspapers are not yet obsolete, but we wanted to go back to earlier methods of producing and consuming newspapers as a way to investigate critically a variety of trends and practices in the contemporary city. Joseph immediately suggested a model he had seen in China, the Dàzìbào (大字报), or wall-mounted newspaper, meant to be read — and presumably discussed — in public. Then I began to do research into 19th century New York. A fascinating book called City Reading explains the proliferation of print culture in New York on the facades of buildings."

"Over the past decade, epochal transformations have reshaped the context within which architecture is conceived and debated. The Internet has made images and information free and instantly ubiquitous; magazines... have been challenged to redefine their purpose and economic model in the light of dwindling readerships; blogs have given a global audience... to anyone with an Internet connection. In all of this, architecture criticism in the traditional sense appears to have all but vanished...As Peter Kelly, editor of Blueprint, wrote in a recent editorial, “As traditional publishing media and institutions become less influential, one wonders where architects can go to find informed, intelligent criticism of their work”.

Is criticism in the traditional sense still relevant or useful? If the role of the print publication in contemporary production irreversibly declines, what is its future role? What forces will shape architectural production in a post-critical environment?

The Idler will open a bookstore and coffeehouse in the 18th century style, with lots of talks and events: "In Ancient Greece, the word for school, σχολή, also meant ‘leisure.’ Education was a pleasure; it was a privilege freely chosen by the freeborn citizens of Athens. The Idler Academy wants to bring this spirit of cultivated leisure to the 21st century, and cross it with the lively atmosphere of an 18th century coffeehouse. We will sell a wide range of new and secondhand books, largely educational in nature. We will serve excellent coffee and hot chocolate. We will sell games, curios and Idler clothes. We will provide delicious cakes. We will teach courses in academic and practical subjects, from Latin to embroidery, from book-keeping to ukulele, from life-drawing to herb growing. This is a place to read, think, debate and learn, to sharpen your mind and learn creative skills. Above all, we seek liberty, and our Latin motto, libertas per cultum, means ‘freedom through education."

"The U.S. Department of State and UC Berkeley's Center for New Media are working together to explore new technologies that can solicit insightful ideas on U.S. foreign policy. Opinion Space is a new tool that uses data visualization and statistical analysis to give all participants an equal opportunity to have their opinions heard and to vote on the ideas of others."