The pair have been established in Japan for some years, especially with their widely admired 21 Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, which opened in 2005. These thoughts needled me as I walked away from the recently opened New Museum in New York by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the principals of the Tokyo-based firm SANAA. Does one write from the lofty principle that truth must be spoken to power, or at least to fashion? Will the reader come away from this exercise in scorching criticism of buildings and urban spaces with a heightened appreciation for the built environment and its importance to our daily lives? Should one be strict even with buildings that are more or less positive contributions to the otherwise vast wasteland of mediocre urban construction, and if so, how strict?
For a serious critic, the impulse to write uncomplimentary things should always provoke a bout of preliminary introspection. To build a building is hard to criticize a building is, by comparison, easy.
