Goldberger, Paul

Bio Sketch

Paul Goldberger (b. 1950) is an American architectural critic and journalist, the most widely read architecture critic of his generation. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1984 for his work at The New York Times, where he was architecture critic from 1973 to 1997, and has been the architecture critic of The New Yorker since 1997 (a decade of that work is acknowledged in Why Architecture Matters). He studied at Yale — where, as he recounts in the book, he was converted from the modernist canon he arrived with to the historicist Gothic and Georgian campus buildings of James Gamble Rogers — and taught at Parsons The New School for Design, where he served as dean before returning to the classroom. Vincent Scully, his Yale teacher, is named in the acknowledgments as his greatest influence and is the source of the book's governing image of architecture as "a conversation between the generations."

Key Works

*Why Architecture Matters* (2009) — a critic's essay, modelled on Copland's What to Listen for in Music, on what buildings do to us beyond shelter: art and practicality, object, space, memory, time, and place.
The City Observed, New York: An Architectural Guide to Manhattan — a per-building guide to the city he grew up with.
The Skyscraper — the tall building in history and in the city.
On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Post-modern Age — collected criticism of the 1970s and 1980s.
Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York — the World Trade Center reconstruction as a political and architectural saga.
Contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker; the acknowledgments record his debt to New Yorker editor David Remnick for "the chance to continue to sharpen my critical eye."

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Goldberger supplies the wiki's non-theoretical, experience-first counterweight to the critical and theoretical architecture literature: where Sklair, Kaika, and the spectacle cluster read iconicity through capital, media, and ideology, Goldberger reads the same buildings through use, memory, and the emotional response of the person standing before them. His book is directly useful to Geoffrey's work in three registers — (1) the everyday/vernacular cluster, where his refusal of Pevsner's high/low distinction and his defence of ordinary buildings as the real ground of architectural experience parallel Summerson and Agarez & Mota; (2) the phenomenology of place and dwelling cluster, where his chapters on memory and on the making of place complement Norberg-Schulz, Bachelard, and Heidegger with a critic's concrete building-list; and (3) the iconic/spectacle cluster, where he treats the icon centre-left as one register among others and supplies the canonical description of the icon's symbolic half-life (the bank reduced to a computer icon). His "whole is more than the sum of its parts" is a usable urbanism principle for the Jacobsian and New Urbanism material, and his preservation chapter (Summerson, the Landmarks Law, Grand Central) bridges to the wiki's memory and adaptive-reuse material.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

*Why Architecture Matters* (2009) — the complete statement of his critical position: architecture as art-and-not-art; the object/space/memory/time/place sequence; the ethical function; and the making of place and memory as architecture's ultimate task.