Modern architecture "drab", architects should be subject to public scrutiny and "miserably anti-urban" buildings in Cincinnati.
"In the cities, anything built after the mid-20th century can reliably be predicted to be a drab, utilitarian exercise in poured concrete or, more recently, green glass - or, in Toronto, a tumorous monstrosity bolted on to a stately old museum because someone famous doodled it on a napkin. In smaller cities, traditional main streets are surrounded mostly by potholed roads, strip malls, barn-like arenas and curling clubs that I imagine would give any right-thinking architecture critic the vapours."
National Post
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"Undoubtedly, it is not the future per se that frightens Piano's critics, but the prospect of a future decided and enforced by architects and their powerful corporate clients without consulting the people whose lives are affected, and showing no respect for the historic center whose beauty will be diminished by the new tower. In a culture that pays lip service to nonconformity and the questioning of authority, the power of architectural elites has yet to be subject to the kind of public questioning now typically directed at political and economic ones."
Projo
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"Not all modernist structures are so miserably anti-urban but as a rule they present hostile faces to the street and slow the reemergence of non-pathological street life in American cities. No one is threatening to tear down the Empire State Plaza, but if the wreckers came for the fire station in Cincinnati, despite my appreciation of its aesthetic merits, I can't say that I would object."
Ordinary Gentlemen
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"This represents a departure from a quarter century of voter-approved mandate to not shadow our parks. It's a very brazen, audacious effort to undermine many of the land use doctrines that San Franciscans have held sacred."
SF Gate
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"The inability of new Philadelphia buildings - the new Jewish museum, the Barnes - to provide entrances on their main street is becoming almost pathological. Once inside Family Court, people will find the public spaces as clinical as a morgue. Although Family Court serves some of the most vulnerable members of society … no public art is planned. The embellishment amounts to cherrywood for the lobby ceiling and travertine for the floor. The frigid open lobby, incidentally, will be used to host supervised visitation sessions between children and their estranged parents."
Philadelphia Inquirer
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