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Is Architectural Criticism Pointless? Not According to AI
ChatGPT has no sensory organs, but it asserts that architecture is “a material and tactile experience.”
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
Although the AI model shows intelligence in quickly parsing huge amounts of data to deliver relevant responses, it lacks a capacity for original observations and critical judgment. It mostly synthesizes what others have already written. In this sense, skilled criticism is less replaceable by AI than more straightforward types of reportage and communication.
ChatGPT claims to be politically neutral (I asked it), but it knows that architecture and public space can be politically charged. “Write a 25-word review of a public plaza from a leftist perspective,” I say, to which the AI responds:
The plaza is a great place for people to come together and express their views, but it could benefit from greater access to resources for those in need.
I’d call that a standard liberal view of public space. “What is the leftist critique of public space in liberal democracies?”
The leftist critique of public space in liberal democracies is that these spaces often fail to truly serve and represent the interests of marginalized groups. They argue that public spaces are too often designed to serve and reflect the interests of the privileged and powerful…
“Write a 25-word review of a public plaza from a right-wing fascist perspective.”
Beautiful public plaza; a proud symbol of our nation's strength and unity.
I hit the “regenerate” button to run the same prompt again and receive a cartoonishly cringeworthy cry:
A public plaza with its loud, diverse crowd is a disgrace. It needs to be shut down to preserve order and stability.
Read more about AI’s “defense” of criticism here.
Black Rock, or: Goodbye, Twentieth Century
The cosmically pop take on Eero Saarinen’s CBS Building you never knew you needed
by Enrique Ramirez
It makes sense, after all, that Black Rock is the background against which photographer Michael Ochs lensed the Byrds. Here was a band at its height, ready to slip the surly bonds of gravity, to reach escape velocity and achieve galactic-level stardom, foregrounded against a building that commemorated the ascendancy of CBS chairman, William S. Paley, from salesman to American media juggernaut. In several of the photographs, Ochs frames each Byrd inside a climbing ribbon of smoked glass, ensnaring them in Black Rock’s black granite saw-tooths. Forget Goethe’s old saying about architecture and frozen music. These space age folkies appear frozen in flight, cold, in thrall to the shadow of this granite beast.
And beast it was, a skyscraper evoking a host of dark metonyms. In 1966, Ada Louise Huxtable called the building many things: a cigarette lighter, a trick mirror, a concrete shaft sunk 200 feet into its plaza at Sixth Avenue and West 52nd Street, cut off from rhythms of street life by a 25-foot moat of a setback. This building was not sepulchral. No, this functional marvel was only somber, a granite monument to “deadness and darkness” (her words), a foreboding cut short only because it would require acknowledging that Black Rock was a grave. Its reinforced concrete shaft, wrapped in a sheath of black Canadian granite, was a cenotaph to moribund modernist ideals.
Read more about the Byrds, Black Rock, and outer space here.
The Midblock Churches of Harlem
These strangely situated places of worship were designed to be read in close proximity and relationship to their neighbors.
by Amanda Iglesias
In New York, corner lots connote status. While the city is full of churches clad in European garb, there are few piazzas, squares, and plazas to frame them, as there would be in, say, Rome or Amsterdam. Instead, New York offers parishes and congregations the corner lot. Think of First Baptist on West 79th and Broadway; Church of the Heavenly Rest on East 90th and Fifth Avenue; Grace Church on East Tenth and Broadway; St. Patrick’s Cathedral spans the full block between East 50th and 51st on Fifth Avenue. The larger and more prominent a church’s site, the more corners its address accrues: St. John the Divine is located between West 110th, West 113th, Amsterdam Avenue, and Morningside Drive.
For newer congregations and those with limited resources—often serving minority or immigrant communities—the corner lot simply isn’t an option. Such might have been the case in Harlem for three of the city’s most prominent Black churches: St. Philip’s Episcopal (204 West 134th Street), Abyssinian Baptist Church (132 West 138th Street), and Mother African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion (140 West 137th Street). All are mid-block and nearly invisible from Malcolm X Boulevard or Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares. An unsuspecting passerby will hardly notice these churches until, sometimes literally, stumbling upon them.
Read more about these photography-resistant churches here.
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