Alexandra Lange
Architecture Critic
Alexandra Lange writes the Critical Eye column for Curbed, covering design in many forms: new parks and Instagram playgrounds, teen urbanists and architectural icons, postmodernism and the post-retail era. Her latest book, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids, is being published by Bloomsbury USA in June 2018.
Alexandra was a 2014 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and received a publication grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for her new book. She has taught design criticism at the School of Visual Arts and New York University, and also wrote the book on it: Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012).
Alexandra lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Let Christopher Alexander design your life
In the second installment of our summer series, Curbed’s architecture critic re-reads A Pattern Language.
Major Roberto Burle Marx exhibition brings landscape architecture to the foreground
On view through September, the show is the largest exhibition ever put on at the New York Botanical Garden— and the first to display an entire outdoor garden.
Virginia McAlester is the most popular architecture writer in America
In the first installment of our summer series, Curbed’s architecture critic re-reads A Field Guide to American Houses.
Celebrating six trailblazing Bauhaus women
As the Bauhaus turns 100, we turn the spotlight on the school’s extraordinary women, whose experiences are still instructive today.
Why U.S. cities should stop whining and embrace winter
The cold is not the problem, it’s the way we are looking at it. Here’s how to make art of winter.
2018 in architecture: The good, the bad, and the urbanism
Two architecture critics weigh in on a year in design.
A museum grows in Houston
When Renzo Piano’s Menil Collection building opened in 1987 critics called it "just perfect." Johnston Marklee’s Drawing Institute improves on perfection.
We should use the electric scooter boom to rethink our streets—beyond traffic lanes
Let’s organize the city outside our front door with as much care as we do our homes.
Meet the Hunters, Vermont’s modernist-house pioneers
The Eameses weren’t the only postwar couple designing glassy houses, patenting simplified chairs, and rethinking modern living.
How not to cheat children: Let them build their own playgrounds
"A child must feel he has an effect on his environment. If they cannot create, they must destroy."