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Philadelphia, which has been experiencing a wave of church demolitions, lost one of its largest and most distinctive sanctuaries when a West Philadelphia apartment developer razed a 19th-century church and seminary at 43rd and Chestnut Streets. 
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Another ornate Philadelphia church faces the wrecking ball
Philadelphia, which has been experiencing a wave of church demolitions, lost one of its largest and most distinctive sanctuaries when a West Philadelphia apartment developer razed a 19th-century church and seminary at 43rd and Chestnut Streets. 
Architecture critic Inga Saffron reviews Comcast’s new tower
As Philadelphia’s tallest skyscraper, the new Comcast Technology Center at 18th and Arch will inevitably be judged by how it looks among the clouds. Photo: TIM TAI / Staff Photographer The tower's mast is visible from the Washington Monument in Eakins Oval.
A tale of two historic Philadelphia buildings: One rises from the ashes. The other falls to the wrecking ball by Inga Saffron
On a frigid January evening in 2016, just two weeks into Mayor Kenney's tenure, a historic, 19th-century apartment house off Rittenhouse Square erupted in a gusher of flames and smoke.  Photo: DAVID SWANSON / Staff Photographer All that is left of the former Chocolate Factory on Washington Avenue is a small piece of the original building and a smokestack.

A Conversation on Architectural Criticism and Advocacy with Inga Saffron and Aaron Wunsch

Monday, April 15, 2019
6:00 pm

Meyerson Hall, Upper Gallery
The University of Pennsylvania School of Design
210 S. 34th St
Philadelphia, PA

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How do you get readers of a large daily newspaper to care about preservation and contemporary design? Are these matters of paramount public interest in a city and a nation with urgent social and economic problems? What is the role of taste in architectural criticism? What can you do to hold government accountable for certain obvious missteps or illegalities? Who decides what counts as "architectural criticism" versus "investigative journalism"? These are some of the questions implicit in the writing of Inga Saffron, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Join Aaron Wunsch, associate professor of Historic Preservation and Landscape Architecture, as he and Saffron explore these and related matters in a conversation-style discussion on April 15. 

Registration is required by April 10, 2019.

Inga Saffron
One of the leading voices on architecture and urbanism in the U.S., Inga Saffron has been the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1999. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She spent a year as a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 2012.  In recognition of her advocacy for the built environment, the National Building Museum awarded her the Vincent Scully Prize in 2018, named in honor of the celebrated Yale University architectural historian.

Before assuming her current position, Saffron spent five years as a correspondent for The Inquirer in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. She covered wars in the former Yugoslavia and in Chechnya, and witnessed the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny. It was in part because of those experiences that she became interested in the fate of cities and began writing about architecture. She is the author of  Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy, published by Broadway Books in 2002. She lives with her family in Philadelphia.