West Coast newsies, fess up:

Your paper probably did a stroke piece on that new Disney Hall in Los Angeles, didn’t it? Seems everybody was mad for the thing; William Powers of National Journal describes the carnage, then offers this aside on why we write about architecture.

Architectural criticism is a bit of a media backwater, and that’s a shame, given how these buildings define our landscapes and lives. But it’s a specialty full of talented people, and the reviews have been fabulously entertaining — breathless and deep, brainy and purple in their efforts to explain the genius of this building. What’s nice is, this is purple with a purpose. The building, which I saw last spring just before it was completed, isn’t just gorgeous, it’s mysteriously gorgeous. And it’s a mystery you want solved. We’re not there yet, but the adjectival orgy has been anything but dull.

I used to wonder about reviewing architecture; I thought reviews were supposed to be about whether you should buy the CD or see the movie, and there’s just not much a consumer component to a building. It’s there and we’re stuck with it. Later I realized Architecture was a form of Visual Art and therefore must be subjected to critical scrutiny. The most similar art form I can think of is typography, whose critics fret over the tiniest details of serifs and x-heights. They always sound absurd to outsiders — what does it matter what the letters are shaped like as long as you can read them? — but you’d risk a belt in the mouth if you said this to a typographer’s, uh, face. But once you learn the case (ug, another pun) for typography it’s easy to be won over and find yourself agonizing over Helvetica Vs. Cheltenham. Everything’s an art form to the artist doing it, I suppose.