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"Architecture," writes Paul Goldberger in his latest book, "begins to matter when it goes beyond protecting us from the elements, when it begins to say something about the world--when it begins to take on the qualities of art." Aptly, the book is titled Why Architecture Matters.
You could say that Goldberger's career has been nothing more than a series of restatements of why architecture matters, but he appears to have done a pretty good job: the architecture critic for The New Yorker since 1997, he is also the former dean of the Parsons School of Design at The New School in New York City, the author of numerous books, and the recipient, in 1984, of the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism. Why Architecture Matters will be out in paperback later this month. Here, Goldberger discusses the mainstreaming of design, how technology is simultaneously helping and hurting architecture, and "Hey Jude."
What do you say when people ask you, "What do you do?"
I'm an architecture critic, which is to say a writer and journalist who gets to write about the things he is most interested in.
What new idea or innovation is having the most significant impact on the design world?
I think the truly transformative development in the world of design over the last generation has been its evolution into the mainstream. We are a much more visual culture than we once were; people care more about design and architecture, and it has become more accessible to them. That doesn't mean everything is suddenly great, and that we're in some kind of design nirvana. A lot of what we do now is lousy, as it always has been. But if you look at the difference between, say, an iPhone and a Princess phone, or a flat-screen television and the faux-French Provincial TV cabinets we grew up seeing, or the difference between IKEA and the furniture stores our parents shopped in, you see how much more sophisticated as works of design the objects people live with today are. And the same is true of at least a lot of our public architecture, with architects like Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libeskind--to name but a few--building museums, institutional buildings, cultural centers, and more in cities large and small all over the world.