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MOST RECENT ARTICLES BY:

Justin Davidson

See all their articles from across New York Magazine

Justin Davidson has been New York Magazine’s architecture and classical-music critic since 2007 and was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2002. He is the author of Magnetic City: A Walking Companion to New York.

  1. street view
    The Bronx Children’s Museum Is Just Antic EnoughLike a peek into a happy kid’s brain.
  2. street view
    MoMA’s ‘Architecture Now’ Exists in Some Other New YorkOne that has fewer impediments and more money.
  3. street view
    The Upper West Side’s Zone of Pedestrian DeathThe area around 96th Street is dangerous. And it’s hardly the worst in town.
  4. street view
    One Way to a Better City: Ask Disabled People to Design ItWouldn’t everyone fare a little better if (to take just one example) airport luggage-screening counters were lower?
  5. street view
    Two Supportive-Housing Projects Make the Case for Building Many MoreThey’re cheaper than the alternatives, acceptable to the neighbors, and successful among people who were living on the street.
  6. street view
    An Office Is Wherever We Decide It IsA new book chronicles employers’, architects’, and employees’ relentless reinvention of the workplace.
  7. street view
    Walkable City’s Jeff Speck Knows There Are Worse Things Than Crawling TrafficTen years on, he reflects on pipe dreams turned real (like California’s ADU boom) and not (like truly safe streets).
  8. street view
    Can the Hochul-Adams New New York Actually Happen?The Hochul-Adams mission statement is big on sweeping ideas — and way short on explaining how any of this happens.
  9. street view
    The Upside-Down Building Is No Longer NovelAt Greenpoint’s new Eagle + West, cantilevers are just one more architectural gimmick.
  10. street view
    New St. Nick: The Glowed-up Greek Church at Ground ZeroThe tiny marble Greek Orthodox church next to the World Trade Center finally opens, 21 years after its predecessor was destroyed.
  11. street view
    When Caves Were Avant-Garde ArchitectureAt the Noguchi Museum, the joys (and damp) of living below grade.
  12. street view
    Out of Horror, Beauty: A Visit to the New Sandy Hook Memorial“It was worth the wait.”
  13. street view
    Norman Foster’s Skyscrapers Are Perfect for the City That Just DisappearedAn impeccable space for office work arrives with everything—except a guarantee of office work.
  14. street view
    Keeping It Weird at 550 MadisonThe former AT&T/Sony tower gets a few of its spikier details sanded off but retains a lot of its Johnsonian strangeness.
  15. street view
    On the Vision — and Limits — of a Century of Grand Urban PlansThe Regional Plan Association marks its birthday with a show in Grand Central Terminal.
  16. street view
    The Emigrant Becomes a Giant Projector ScreenRestored bank building now holds digitally reproduced gold.
  17. street view
    Morningside Heights Gets That Much HigherTwo seminary campuses monetize their air.
  18. hot garbage
    Voyage of the GrossEven though every other option is better, most of New York’s trash still goes into a hole in the ground.
  19. dystopias
    Westworld Has Become West Side WorldPresent-day New York, with a few digital additions, was perfectly suitable as a dystopian set.
  20. street view
    Waterline Square Is Better Than We Had a Right to ExpectThe last piece of Riverside South clicks into place.
  21. street view
    What to Do With a Crumbling ChurchWest Park Presbyterian wants to demolish its deteriorating landmark building. We asked an architecture firm for a plan to keep it standing.
  22. street view
    The Morgan Library’s Gilded Age Garden Gets a Glow-upA restoration that looks as rich as it should.
  23. street view
    Two Upscale Developments Offer Two Divergent Futures for the South BronxBrookfield’s Bankside looks to Manhattan; the all-affordable Peninsula aims to raise the standard for locals.
  24. street view
    What’s a Bicycle For?A new book digs into our ambivalent relationship with life on two wheels.
  25. street view
    Finding a Future for Ukraine’s Destroyed CitiesThe country’s planners want to reclaim its independent identity and plan for life after Russian oil.
  26. street view
    An Exhibit Imagines How Design Can Reconnect CommunitiesIf only it weren’t illegal.
  27. street view
    Lincoln Center Resets Itself as a Cultural Town Square for SpringQuinceañeras, dance parties, and underground jazz will animate the plaza, but will that energy extend past Labor Day?
  28. street view
    Is There Still an Architectural Avant-Garde?If there is, it won’t look like a Zaha Hadid swoop.
  29. street view
    The Museum of Natural History’s New Addition Is a Giant Concrete MarshmallowStudio Gang’s design aims to bring the museum into the urgent present.
  30. street view
    What Will It Take for Architects to Stop Working With Autocrats?Designers have long relied on a catalogue of excuses to work with questionable clients. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
  31. architecture
    Pritzker Winner Francis Keré’s Small Buildings Have Things to Teach Big CitiesA lesson from the Pritzker-winning architect: Don’t overlook local materials, no matter how low-tech.
  32. street view
    Can Better Design Redeem the Cruise Ship?Our architecture critic goes to sea.
  33. street view
    The Start-up Aesthetic Defines New York’s Two New Ivy CampusesThey say they want to engage the community, but that outreach is self-limiting.
  34. street view
    The Concrete Innovators of Delhi and DhakaA MoMA show devoted to the inventive post-partition architecture of South Asia.
  35. street view
    La Guardia Airport Is No Longer a HellscapeThe new Terminal B: not bad at all!
  36. street view
    Most Green Buildings Aren’t Even Close to Being Carbon-Neutral — YetWith a few exceptions, their claims — at least so far — are built on fuzzy math and borrowing against the future.
  37. street view
    Hochul’s Penn Station Plan Is the Worst Kind of Urban RenewalDid we learn nothing from tearing the guts out of city after city in the 1960s?
  38. street view
    The Battery Maritime Building Is Beautiful, But It’s No Longer OursA gracious public structure taken mostly private.
  39. street view
    Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial in D.C. Is a Huge AnticlimaxIt somehow tells us less about Ike than it intends to.
  40. street view
    A Rare Feat: A Tower by a Major Architect That Doesn’t Fight With Its NeighborsAt the corner where J&R Music and Computer World once stood, the condo building by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners is confident but not loud.
  41. street view
    Is This Really the Best 79th Street Dock House We Can Get?Renderings show a boxy institutional structure that could be almost anywhere. Surely we can do better.
  42. street view
    Concrete Doesn’t Have to Be an Ecological NightmareNew technologies may drastically reduce its huge carbon footprint.
  43. street view
    Why Do New Buildings Look So Basic?We can embrace ornamentation in architecture without returning to the past.
  44. urbanism
    Perfecting the New York StreetWe consulted architects and planners to create an achievable, replicable plan — one suited to a city embracing its public spaces as never before.
  45. getting around
    Meet the Newest Next Penn StationHochul is tightening the focus from Cuomo’s sweeping plans and looking to fast-track the project. Maybe it’ll work.
  46. architecture review
    The Observation Deck at One Vanderbilt Is a Ridiculous Place“Surely there’s a better way than assaulting them with lights and mirrors.”
  47. reclaiming
    A Landscape Architect Who Loves Ruins and Hates Ruin PornJulie Bargmann just won the first $100,000 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander prize.
  48. cityscape
    What It Takes to Give David Geffen Hall a New SoundA look inside the New York Philharmonic’s home, en route to its new (and, fingers crossed, better) acoustics.
  49. that’s no moon
    The Academy Museum’s Orb Is Like When the Trailer Is Better Than the MovieBursting Renzo Piano’s big L.A. bubble.
  50. architecture review
    Manhattan West Is (a Little Bit) What Hudson Yards Should Have BeenIt’s still a corporate simulacrum of a city, but given the history of such gestures, it’s surprising they got it anywhere close to right.
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