Christopher Hawthorne on Punch List and the state of architecture criticism
The architecture critic talks his old job as LA's Chief Design Officer, starting a newsletter, and the untapped audience for architecture writing.
I first interviewed Christopher Hawthorne back on the podcast back in 2018 (episode 96), shortly after he was appointed by then-mayor Eric Garcetti to serve as Los Angeles’s first Chief Design Officer. Upon completing that role, Hawthorne has kept busy: he moved east where he’s teaching at Yale, returning to writing for a variety of publications, and, most notably, launching Punch List, a new independent architecture publication. Since its launch, Punch List has been a must-read publication each week for me, covering new buildings, book reviews, and other architecture discourse.
I was curious to hear about the new project so I asked Christopher a few questions about architecture writing, his time working for LA, and what he wants to build with Punch List.
Before we get to your current work, I was hoping we could talk about your last job: you were on the podcast back in 2018, shortly after you were appointed the first Chief Design Officer of the city of Los Angeles. Looking back, what are you proudest of during your tenure? How do you measure the impact your office had on the city?
Working in the Mayor’s Office was among the most intense experiences of my career, not just because I was creating a new office from scratch but also because the pandemic hit about 18 months after I started. My colleagues and I all had to pivot to focus on the logistics of closing down the city and then, in phases, protocols for reopening it. I was working on everything from plans to convert the Convention Center to a field hospital (which thankfully we didn’t end up having to do) to design guidelines for outdoor dining.
Looking back, I’m proudest of the breadth of places where my work had some impact, from housing and procurement to public art and street furniture. In some cases my role was to refine or work to improve the design of a key public building already making its slow way through the city process; in others it was to start much earlier, fine-tuning the language of RFQs and RFPs for urban-design projects to attract the most skilled architecture and design teams we could; in still others it was to launch projects directly from my office, including an ideas competition for missing middle housing and a pilot project featuring some of the country’s most promising emerging architecture offices to design preapproved accessory dwelling units, or ADUs. I was interested to see that New York City has just launched a similar program.
Beyond the housing work, the single initiative that had the most impact was probably the Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group, which we launched in 2019 and included about three dozen historians, artists, architects, curators, Tongva leaders, and a number of colleagues in various city departments. The goal was to tailor a set of policies allowing Los Angeles—so long in thrall to its reputation as the city of the future, as this great Ed Ruscha series reflects—to treat its own history, especially as it plays out in public spaces, more thoughtfully. After extensive community outreach, we released a report with 19 specific policy recommendations. These soon began shaping the next generations of memorials and monuments in Los Angeles, including a memorial to the victims of the 1871 Chinese Massacre, designed by Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong and Judy Chui-Hua Chung, that is now moving toward completion near the epicenter of that violence.
We also used the report itself to signal a new level of design ambition for the city’s public agencies, working with the graphic design firm Polymode to produce a print volume that includes not just records of our deliberations but also newly commissioned essays and photography, excerpts from writers like Mike Davis, Alex Ross, John Rechy, and Lynell George, and custom maps by the great Scott Reinhard. Polymode designed the Civic Memory website to reshuffle the table of contents every time you reload it, mimicking the nonhierarchical and polycentric nature of L.A. and reflecting our editorial as well as political goals for the project as a whole, which began with an effort to avoid a doctrinaire, top-down imposition of new rules for monument-making.
Even the typefaces in the report reflect this sensibility. The headlines, for example, are set in Maria of Los Angeles (MOLA), a design by Roberto Rodriguez that was inspired in part by the murals of Our Lady of Guadalupe that you can see across the city. As with the ADU program, which spun off siblings in a number of cities and counties, the Civic Memory effort helped spawn a number of similar projects, by institutions inside and outside of L.A. County, inspired by our specific approach. That’s one way, I think, to measure impact.
When you were on the show, we talked a lot about the value of your background in writing and criticism (as opposed to practicing design) in taking on that CDO role. Now on the other side, I’m wondering if working for the city changed how you think about the role of the writer or the critic now? As someone writing regularly again, are there new lenses you bring to the work because of that experience? Has your critical project changed at all?