Waving 'bye to Ouroussoff

Sam Hall Kaplan — who probably lost his weekly commentary gig at KCRW for dissing Frank Gehry during the Disney Hall hoopla last year — writes in the Downtown News that the departure of Nicolai Ouroussoff as L.A. Times architecture critic is being cheered in some local planning and design circles. He draws a parallel to his own departure as Times design critic in 1991.

The persistent complaint during my decade there was that my coverage was bent toward such local issues as urban design and historic preservation that some aspiring star architects considered mundane, to the detriment of aesthetics of architecture and other academic concerns.

They were right, of course. I considered architecture then, as now, a social art, primarily involved with creating spaces and places for human endeavor, and regarded myself an advocate of the design and development concerns of the general readership, not for a narrow group of peers, select professionals and academic sycophants, however seductive.

Invitations to their soirees and seminars had a pernicious price of publicity I did not want to pay. These self-appointed aesthetes tended to be insufferable, even if their settings displayed exquisite taste.

Conversely, the major criticism of Ouroussoff is that he devoted excessive and indiscriminate coverage to celebrity architects considered on the cutting edge of an increasingly iconic-oriented profession; and that he was prissy and disdainful, preferring theoretical issues rather than, say, pressing local needs, such as more and better designed housing, schools and livable streets.

I know architects who think Ouroussoff is great, so I suspect opinion is more divided than Kaplan allows. In any case, the architecture community could do worse: the LAT has gone more than two years without a theater critic since Michael Phillips moved to the Chicago Tribune.

12:02 AM Monday, July 19 2004 • Link
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He's largely right, though. The next Times architecture critic, whether it's me or someone else, needs to write more like Kaplan. The problem was not that Ouroussoff failed to write about all kinds of architecture; it was that he failed to write about developers who treat architecture as movie studios do, putting out relentless amounts of vile schlock that they hope to redeem by producing one or two prestige pictures. Face it, Eli Broad may have his name slapped onto some key spaces around the pueblo, but if you look at environmental impact, as half of Kaufman and Broad he has been a net travesty.

The next arch crit needs to think in those kinds of terms, and needs an editor with brass balls. My magic 8 says NFL.

Posted by: joseph at July 19, 2004 11:09 AM

It's been TWO years since the LA Times had a theater critic?? That's pathetic! Can you imagine the NY Times being as lazy and cheap? If the LA paper can be so slack about something like that, doesn't that suggest there's a good possibility they'll be no less leisurely towards finding a replacement for Ouroussoff?

Posted by: Kyle at July 19, 2004 01:27 PM

Good points. Things change. Theater coverage (remember Dan Sullivan?), jazz coverage (remember Leonard Feather?), architecture coverage ....

Posted by: The Raven at July 20, 2004 10:59 AM
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