Walter Kerr, the drama critic for The New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times from the 1950s through the 1980s, once said that the difference between a reviewer and a critic is that the former assumes his reader has not seen or read or heard the work in question and the latter assumes he has. In this sense, those who comment for daily newspapers on theater, art, books, or films are almost invariably reviewers, not critics. Such reviewers have long been staples of the popular press. Architectural commentary, however, has not been nearly such a staple.

It is a curious thing that while we have book reviewers and film reviewers and theater reviewers, we do not have architecture reviewers—only critics.

In the nineteenth century, Montgomery Schuyler wrote discerning commentary for The New York World and The New York Times, as well as for specialized publications. In the next century, The New Yorker magazine made up somewhat for the lack of architectural commentary at the dailies by having first George Chappell and then Lewis Mumford write the “Skyline” column. This dearth only began to change in the early 1960s when The New York Times hired Ada Louise Huxtable to be its architecture critic. Huxtable made a splash at the Times, writing about her subject at a fraught time for American cities. The “urban crisis” was in full swing. Popular discontent with the unlovely products of modernist architects and planners was