I’m doing my homework. Ahead of a call with Christopher Hawthorne, I start by catching up on his syllabus, beginning with a 1997 opus assigned as an opening week reading in his class on writing and criticism at Yale School of Architecture. Nearly 30 years later, revisiting Herbert Muschamp’s review of the Guggenheim Bilbao entails stepping into a time machine. In a New York Times Magazine browser tab, the prose sticks out like a baroque cartouche in a spare mid-century room. Under a headline venerating “The Miracle in Bilbao,” the 5,000-word opus is generously furnished in metaphor and mythos. “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman. It’s a ship, an artichoke, the miracle of the rose,” Muschamp writes, describing the building as “the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe.” In 2025, it’s hard to imagine such weighty declarations — or so many printed pages — attributed to a single building.
I wonder what the students make of it. For Hawthorne, however, teaching is just one of several strands in a varied 30-year career. A long-time architecture critic, Hawthorne has enjoyed stints at Slate and then at the Los Angeles Times, which made him one of the country’s leading voices in the fast-eroding field of architecture criticism. Then, in 2018, he became the city’s Chief Design Officer under former mayor Eric Garcetti. For the next four years, Hawthorne’s office oversaw a wide range of housing, infrastructure and transit initiatives, including the high-profile Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) Standard Plan Program, which introduced L.A. backyards to a series of pre-approved homes, all while bringing designs by the likes of SO-IL, Jennifer Bonner and emerging local studios like Design, Bitches into tangible — if limited — conversation with the housing crisis. If the sweep of Bilbao starchitecture defined the architectural culture of the 90s, comparatively humble, policy-driven residential aspirations reflect a decade of more grounded aspirations.
We caught up shortly after the opening of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, where Hawthorne is hosting Speakers’ Corner, an ongoing series of talks animating an otherwise insipid central exhibition. Days after our conversation, he launched Punch List, a weekly newsletter that has quickly shot to the top of my reading list. From an incisive early dissection of Peter Zumthor’s new LACMA wing, Hawthorne’s nascent œuvre includes a standout look at the architectural manifestations of Orbanism in Hungary’s capital city. While situating architecture within a political, historical and socio-economic context, it hints at Muschamp’s aesthetic sweep and delves deep into design, making a convincing case that buildings — even individual buildings — are still worth a few thousand words.
Stefan Novakovic: Tell me about your life growing up. How did you become interested in architecture?
- Christopher Hawthorne
I grew up in a house from 1920 by Julia Morgan in Berkeley, and that was probably my first association with architecture. I had a sense very early on that architecture was a profession, that a house was a thing that was designed, and not just the thing that you lived in. And then, when I was in high school in the 80s, I became quite interested in journalism. I remember reading Alan Temko, who was the long-time architecture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. Sometime in the mid-80s, the New York Times also expanded with a new national edition. I remember reading it at the breakfast table, and being exposed to the work of Ada Louise Huxtable and — a few years later — Paul Goldberger.
I think that because of all that, I had a sense relatively early on that architecture was a profession, something you could do for a living. And then when I got to Yale as an undergraduate, and began studying with Vincent Scully and others, it became clear that if I were to pursue some kind of a career related to architecture, it was going to be writing about it. Definitely not on the design side. I never had any aspirations to be a practitioner. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer, and in particular, wanted to be a critic.
How did you interpret the role of a critic at that time? What was happening in the architectural culture as you started your career, and what kind of media landscape did you enter?
It’s a useful question, because it puts me as a critic back into the position of being a reader. And for me as a young reader, what criticism offered was a glimpse into the world. Obviously, the sensibilities varied, and Ada Louise Huxtable had loyalties that were distinct from Vincent Scully, for example. But as I understood it, critics were explaining why buildings look the way they did, why architects were making the kinds of decisions they did, what the preoccupations of architects were. And in those days, of course, it was post-modernism. And all the permutations of post-modernism in architecture and architecture criticism. But by the time I graduated, there was a kind of sense that architecture was chasing its own tail, and even more importantly, there was a major global recession at the turn of the decade, so very little was getting built.
After graduating, my first editorial job was at the Seattle Weekly, an alternative paper. I think my first byline there was actually a review of of Peter Blake’s memoir, which I highly recommend. It’s a fantastic book called No Place Like Utopia. This was 1993, 1994, which was a really tough time for architecture, particularly in the United States. I would write reviews of books, theatre, film, kind of biding my time until there was actually new architecture to write about.
A little later, I started my first full time editorial job at the East Bay Express in in Emeryville. Maybe the first proper building review that I did was of Charles Moore’s business school for UC Berkeley – a build that, incidentally, has held up better than much of Moore’s work. There was also the Gap headquarters by Bob Stern in San Francisco, but new buildings were few and far between.
At the same time, I was very lucky to start my career with alternative weeklies — which provided a space for many critics to grow and find their voice. Sacha Jenkins, a great hip hop critic, who just passed away, is a great example. So many people who came up through the alternative press who really shaped what criticism was in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. There was a lot of freedom, I remember writing 5,000-word reviews and 10,000-word essays — which I had absolutely no business doing. It was a really good way to cut my teeth. It seems ridiculous now, but I was probably writing about 5,000 words a week.
Over the next few years, the alt weeklies — and then broadsheet newspapers — would start to disappear, slowly and then all at once. At the same time, the “Bilbao” era of architecture was around the corner.
In the mid 90s, things started to pick up. And really, things changed dramatically. In 1997, the economy began to improve, and in the fall of that year, two major projects opened: the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain by Frank Gehry, and, much closer to home, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles by Richard Meier. I remember that those two projects — but particularly Bilbao — changed the equation in some pretty dramatic ways.
So in the course that I teach graduate students here at Yale every spring, the first assignment I always give them is to diagram the Gehry review of the Guggenheim Bilbao by Herbert Muschamp. I do it for a couple of reasons. One is that architecture students aren’t trained to be writers — and nor should they be. But many of them have really never paused to consider the piece of writing as having structure in the same way that a work of design does.
I also assign the piece because it was such a turning point — that review really did kind of announce a new era. Muschamp, to his credit, was very prescient about this. He knew we were entering a new period, which now, in retrospect, we might paint with a pretty broad brush as “starchitecture.” But more acutely, it was an era where capital was flowing back into prominent architectural projects. In turn, architecture was about to become a subject that educated people felt some interest in. And maybe they even felt some responsibility to be literate about it in the same way that they felt a responsibility to be conversant about new books and films.
Re-reading Muschamp’s 1997 review through a historical lens helps me situate it in a different context. It certainly feels out of step with today’s architectural culture and media, but it must have been invigorating in its time. All of a sudden, buildings mattered in a new way; the evocation of Marilyn Monroe transposes architecture onto mass culture. It was also an American building in Europe on the heels of the Cold War, when people still believed in what Francis Fukuyama called the “end of history.” But that proved pretty short-lived.
Soon after Bilbao, there was another major turning point on September 11, 2001. Almost immediately, debates began about how the World Trade Center should be rebuilt or replaced. That conversation was shaped by a very complicated mix of politics, real estate, capital, urbanism and architecture, all swirling together in a debate about the future of the site.
And having mentioned Herbert Muschamp, I think that 9/11 was a kind of Waterloo for him. I want to say first that a lot of his work holds up extraordinarily well — particularly his earlier writing in the New Republic — and I really enjoy teaching it. There are a lot of pieces I still go back to on a regular basis. Having said that, Ground Zero was really a challenge for him — it required a critic who could talk expertly about real estate and politics, about power, as well as about architects and architecture. Within the New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable was the very rare critic who could move seemingly effortlessly between those different categories. I think that Herbert really struggled on the political side of things, and although he wrote some important pieces on Ground Zero, he ultimately failed to clarify to New Yorkers what the stakes were at various points in the rebuilding process.
On one hand, it was probably obvious to most New Yorkers – and most Americans, that whatever gets built on Ground Zero would have some kind of symbolic aesthetic significance. Conversely, when it becomes clear that the real crux of the project is politics and power, what does it matter how a building is dressed?
Ground Zero was really the perfect distillation of these forces. Enough time has passed now that even some of our political leaders probably don’t remember that the process wasn’t run by the City of New York, but by something called the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which was in turn controlled by the states of New York and New Jersey. And ultimately, it was the governors running the project, primarily New York’s George Pataki, who was preparing to launch what turned out to be an ill-fated presidential run on the Republican ticket. On top of that, the real estate developer Larry Silverstein had just signed a new lease on the World Trade Center site about six weeks before the attacks.
None of this is about design per se, but it points to why architectural criticism is so rich as a form of writing. For all our best intentions, for all the best laid plans, for all the noble ambitions of a project like rebuilding after a terror attack in Manhattan, architecture has an uncanny way of revealing what our culture’s priorities actually are. And that has certainly been true of Ground Zero. What ultimately called the shots was a kind of real estate logic, with a thin sheen of political grandstanding on top of it. These were the important values. It was about choosing a political calculus that plays well in the press, combined with a naked real estate logic.
And so you ultimately have this memorial and a collection of towers, which (as had been the case with the original World Trade Center) was vastly over scaled. It produced office space that wasn’t needed — even long before COVID — because certain prerogatives were being prioritized at the expense of others. And as with any architectural project it’s actually amazing how legible those priorities become in the built product.
It all comes back around to buildings, although perhaps without architects as protagonists, which strikes me as a distillation of a shift that was happening as the Bilbao era and the pull of starchitecture gradually waned. Not long after, in 2004, you become the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, in what was still very much a “post 9/11” America entering the War in Iraq. But Los Angeles is a long way from New York. Twenty years later, how would you describe the cultural landscape?
My first official job as a “critic” was at Slate. It feels quaint to say, but in those days it was still notable for being an online-only publication. And I was writing quite a bit about Ground Zero, and sometimes even about Muschamp. Then, in 2004, Nicolai Ouroussoff replaced Herbert at the New York Times, and I was hired to replace Nicolai at the Los Angeles Times.
The first thing to say about L.A. is that it has a kind of global condition. We can have a sense — thanks largely to Hollywood and the entertainment business — that we all know L.A., even if we haven’t spent much time there. It was certainly true for me. My mom grew up in Southern California, but I never lived there. I never imagined actually moving there before I took the L.A. Times job, but I knew enough to be wary of my own sense of understanding the place. So I tried not to get onto too many soap boxes early on.
I wanted to learn as much about the place as I could: Esther McCoy, who pioneered West Coast criticism, through to Reyner Banham and Mike Davis. There’s also a whole slate of literary references to the illegibility of Los Angeles, and how confusing it is to try to understand that place. And from an urban point of view, there was also a sense that the city had overwhelmed attempts to understand or theorize it. I think there are limitations to that critique, in that it’s rooted in perspectives from the East Coast, which reflect a European sense of view. So if you come to L.A. from New York or Chicago — or Paris or London — it might seem illegible. But if you’ve spent time in Latin America, particularly in places like Mexico City or Lima, it makes a lot more sense.
Banham observed that Los Angeles is not organized like a traditional city that you move in and out of a downtown core. Instead, it’s a poly-centric or multi-nodal city where you move across in what he described as a sort of Brownian motion. The relationship to particular geographies — and the relationship between a work of architecture and its immediate surroundings — is therefore different. And there was a great freedom to that architecturally, an openness to young firms and new ideas that in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, made it a kind of hotbed for experimentation.
But Banham was working during a very brief golden age, when the freeways were largely completed and traffic seemed relatively manageable. Our faith in the infrastructure of freeways and the private automobile still seemed justified. By the time I got there in 2004, it was very obvious that things had changed. Traffic was dysfunctional, and concerns about housing affordability were becoming increasingly palpable. But there were silver linings to this. People started spending more time in their own neighbourhoods and developing stronger local identities, while problems with congestion helped spur a push for public transit and more inclusive mobility.
How did all of this reflect the job of an architecture critic? There’s a 2018 essay by Eva Hagberg that I often think about, where she outlines her own career as a critic, before and after an eight-year stint as a PhD student. “I left New York when architecture was a thing and when I returned, all anybody wants to talk about is … urbanism,” Hagberg writes. At the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman had replaced Ouroussoff, and coverage of individual buildings became increasingly rare. Even in architecture magazines, long-form critical reviews were on the way out. And by the time I started working full-time as a journalist in 2015, there was a much larger market for writing about zoning policies, housing affordability and public transit than architecture.
That shift began almost immediately after I arrived at the Los Angeles Times. One of the early reviews that I did was about the Getty Villa project by Machado and Silvetti, which opened in 2005, during my first full year on the job.
In fact, the trajectory of the Getty’s architecture actually is a nice microcosm of how the city evolved. The first Getty museum was built in the 1970s as a very faithful replica of a Roman villa by the firm Langdon and Wilson, and it was placed near the near Pacific Coast Highway on the edge of Malibu. Then, when the Getty needed to expand, it famously found a big empty piece of land by the 405 freeway and hired Richard Meier to do a new campus. When I arrived, the original building had been turned back to the Getty Villa, a home just for the antiquities, and they hired Machado and Silvetti to extend it.
The project was emblematic of the beginning stages of this shift in terms of how Los Angeles understood itself, and how architecture — and criticism — was changing. They treated this strange and kind of garish building as though it was a precious object in the collection that they had uncovered. The conceit of the project is they dug into the landscape and burrowed the new wing into the canyon wall at the edge of the site in a very deferential way. And so it’s a kind of internal project. I think I called it an “anti-icon” at the time. It’s a project that understands the limits of finding new wide, open, empty spaces for new development — cultural or otherwise — and realizes that the architectural challenges for L.A. moving forward are going to have to engage with urban context.
In architectural practice itself, there was a move away from spectacle. That same year, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, which was another key turning point for criticism, like Ground Zero before it. Understanding its consequences required architecture critics to look beyond buildings and design and work across a wider breadth of expertise, encompassing everything from ecology to racial inequality and national politics. It shifted the critical conversation away from individual buildings. Joan Ockman expressed it in a way I quote to my students all the time: we’re thinking about architecture as consequences in the world.
You shifted into politics and policy in an even more tangible way. In 2018, you were appointed Los Angeles’ Chief Design Officer. Some of your initiatives, like the ADU Standard Plan program, captured both an architectural and an urbanist imagination. Since then, there’s been growing interest across North America in appointing design officers or city architects. In Toronto, a new position to oversee procurement and design standards recently opened up. At the same time, I think there’s hesitancy around any mandate concerning “beauty” or “design excellence.” How does that become more than the imposition of aesthetic taste? I’m curious about how the job was structured — and how design can intersect with municipal governance.
There are a number of different ways to locate a job like this within city government. In my case, the role existed within the mayor’s office. The good thing about that is that the mayor will have the ability to convene leaders across departments and have the power to execute projects. And if you have a really supportive mayor like I did, it means that you can really get things done. The downside is that you’re connected to an electoral calendar, and as was the case with me, you’re appointed by a mayor and the position sometimes goes away when that mayor’s term ends.
The other model is to embed this position within a department, typically the planning department, and have it not be subject to political or electoral cycles – you can take a longer term approach. You don’t have to worry about the person who appointed you leaving office. The downside of that would be that you may not have the ability to work across departments, or may not be able to convene the leaders of other departments, which is so often required in city government. So I think there are good arguments for either approach, depending on the particular city and the power of the mayor’s office.
To answer the broader part of your question, I think it’s much less about choosing individual designs or advancing a particular architectural taste or preference than it is about building a constituency — within government and with the general public — for design excellence. And design excellence means economy. It means equity. It means architecture that really reflects the sensibility of the cities and the neighbourhoods where it’s being built. At the same time, it reflects the most efficient use of public money possible. So it’s less about any individual design than making a case for good design across the government.
That’s one the reasons that mayor Garcetti appointed me as opposed to a practicing architect. Part of his thinking, I believe, was that the job would be really about translating the meaning of good design between the various municipal bureaucracies and the general public. It’s about explaining to the public why the government is making certain decisions, and explaining to the government why those decisions have to reflect the values of ambitions of a particular neighbourhood or the city as a whole. The work is really about translation. And I think that’s always been what I’ve tried to do as a critic.
Lead image: Christopher Hawthorne at Speakers’ Corner at the Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Ground Zero: Christopher Hawthorne on Architecture Criticism
The Yale professor and critic reflects on three decades of practice — and his high-profile stint as Los Angeles’ Chief Design Officer.