The Skyscraper Museum Podcast

The prolific architectural critic and journalist Paul Goldberger will discuss highlights from two collections of his essays released this fall by Monacelli and Yale University Press. Building Up and Tearing Down brings together more than fifty essays, from Goldberger's writings for the New Yorker, Metropolis, The New York Times, and other publications that range across architectural and urban issues from Havana to Beijing to Bilbao, Chicago to Las Vegas, and beyond. Dissecting projects from skyscrapers by Norman Foster and museums by Tadao Ando to airports, monuments, suburban shopping malls, and white-brick apartment houses, these essays cover a comprehensive account of the best --and the worst-- of the "age of architecture."

In Why Architecture Matters, Paul Goldberger examines "how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually." In examples ranging from a small Cape Cod cottage, the Prairie houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Lincoln Memorial, to Borromini's Church of Sant'Ivo in Rome, Goldberger raises the awareness of fundamentals --proportion, scale, space, texture, materials, shapes, light, and memory --engaging the reader to learn a new way of seeing and experiencing the built world.

Paul Goldberger is the architecture critic for The New Yorker, where since 1997 he has written the magazine's celebrated "Sky Line" column. He holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in Manhattan. He began his career at The New York Times, where in 1984, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism.