Witold Rybczynski’s project, it seems, is to turn this trend around by examining the built environments of everyday life, and encouraging his readers to follow in kind. The author of 19 books and several hundred essays and articles, Rybczynski is an academic with a populist bent. His career has been characterized by a writing style that is accessible, lively, and full of wonder, with a clear appeal to the general reading public. His latest collection, Mysteries of the Mall, culls from essays that originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. The bulk of the collection dates back to the 1990s, with a smattering of pieces from the last fifteen years. The result is an informal account of some of the 20th century’s most influential architects and architectural movements in the United States, alongside ruminations on the shifting currents, trends, challenges, and contradictions of American cities. 

Throughout the collection, Rybczynski’s writing is clear-headed and thoughtful, knowledgeable but unpretentious. Many of the essays exhibit an even-handed curiosity and delight, such as “Tomorrowland” (1996), a look at Disney’s then-nascent planned community of Celebration, Florida (a cheerful and vaguely utopian experiment in New Urbanism, which lives on as a fairly normal suburb), and “Call Arup” (2007), which emphasizes the uncelebrated but critical role of engineers. (The Arup in question is Ove Arup, a structural engineer and designer whose eponymous global firm is industry-infamous for taking on risky architectural projects.) Rybczynski favors humility, subtlety, and functionality in architecture; his tastes trend toward staid, quietly elegant buildings. He values imagination, but has little patience for the avant-garde, celebrity architects, vanity competitions, or spectacle. “Young architects such as Libeskind, Nouvel, and Koolhaas” he writes, are akin to “show dogs” who garner their reputations through competition-based work that is “refined and styled to the point of caricature.”

This critique is compelling, but it has its limits. “Art shows are eventually dismantled; buildings last for centuries,” Rybczynski writes. “That’s why architecture should be conservative in its instincts. The ‘wow factor’ may excite the visiting tourist and the junketing journalist, but it is a shaky foundation on which to build lasting value.”