What I Learned @dcritconference

The D-Crit Conference is just a memory, so I shouldn’t even be posting this, right? Except, if there’s anything the conference should have taught its participants and audience members, it is that design and criticism take time. As a tribute to the afternoon presentations I saw (really, never been less bored at a conference) I offer terse tribute. I hope the new MFAs will take it in proper spirit: not as a reduction but a first set of tangents.

I missed both keynotes, Peter Hall and John Thackara, but have been told I will hate the latter. If that’s not enough of a challenge to get me to watch a video on the computer, I don’t know what is. The whole afternoon seemed like a celebration of the wide world as design, and that world is one in which critics definitely disagree.

Sarah Froelich: The buffet server was an accessory to women’s liberation

Emily Leibin: Modernists tried to put tradition in the closet, but it always popped out

Laura Forde: Maybe Godard was so good because he only knew the French, rather than the English, meaning of amateur

Angela Riechers: You would be wise to consider how your memorial will age

Katie Henderson: Wes Anderson’s movies can be read as warnings to design obsessives: get out of the house while you can

Alan Rapp: Trespassing is the only way to escape the mall (even if it is a mall)

Chappell Ellison: Next time you are at the movies, pay attention to the carpet

John Cantwell: Car sharing may be against North American nature

Mike Neal: Life on Mars = no space vacation, no Dwell spread

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By Alexandra Lange

Alexandra Lange is an architecture critic and author, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner for Criticism, awarded for her work as a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab. She is currently the architecture critic for Curbed and has written extensively for Design Observer, Architect, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. Lange holds a PhD in 20th-century architecture history from New York University. Her writing often explores the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and design, with a focus on how the built environment shapes everyday life. She is also a recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary from AIGA, an honor she shares with Design Observer’s Editor-in-Chief, Ellen McGirt.