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Robert Campbell, The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic, dies at 88
Robert Campbell died on April 29 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic wrote a monthly Sunday column, Cityscapes, for The Boston Globe with photographer Peter Vanderwalker over four decades all while running his own architecture practice. He had Parkinson’s disease.
“We’ve lost a great one,” Blair Kamin said after Campbell’s passing. Kamin, a fellow Pulitzer winner, said Campbell was “one of the finest, sharpest architecture critics on the planet.” Campbell wrote with “a much-admired mix of authority and ease,” he added.
Campbell’s writing explored, examined, and defined Boston amid some of the city’s most tumultuous years. He got his start at The Boston Globe in the early-1970s, the aftermath of Boston’s court-ordered school desegregation through busing. This was a period when the city was being tested not just architecturally, but socially and politically.
Boston was emerging from urban renewal—neighborhoods had been transformed, an expressway carved through urban fabric, and concrete modernism had become a symbol of both ambition and hubris. Campbell’s nuanced yet acerbic voice offered a clear-eyed, humane perspective on the ways buildings and public spaces could either heal or deepen divisions.
Cityscapes—often no longer than 400 words—paired with Vanderwalker’s photography captured a city in transformation, for better or worse. “I do the best I can,” Campbell told Kira Gould for The Architect’s Newspaper in 2005. “I enjoy making things clear.”
Vanderwalker and Campbell were known for their simple before-and-after technique. Pictured here is downtown Boston during the Central Artery’s construction. (Courtesy Peter Vanderwalker)
Downtown Boston after the Central Artery’s construction. (Courtesy Peter Vanderwalker)
RISD professor Michael Kubo, a Boston native, read Campbell as a kid. “Growing up in Boston, Robert Campbell was the first voice on architecture I ever knew, and a huge part of why I became interested in writing about architecture,” Kubo told AN. “I would clip his weekly articles out of The Boston Globe—I still have the folder. Cityscapes of Boston was likely the first book on architecture I ever owned.”
Vanderwalker, the photographer Campbell collaborated with on Cityscapes of Boston and other articles published in The Boston Globe, took Campbell for one last drive around the city a few months ago. “We drove around Boston for an hour-and-a-half just trashing all the buildings,” he recalled for AN, with bittersweet humor.
“It’s Always Too Big, Too Empty, Too Grand”
Campbell was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, and he was damn proud of it. Buffalo taught him how to look at Boston—he relished in its architectural richness. Campbell earned a masters in architecture from Harvard after studying journalism at Columbia University. He stayed in Cambridge and went to work for Sert, Jackson and Associates.
Campbell’s strength as a critic was evident early. He hit the ground running in 1973 when he took aim at Boston City Hall, an admittedly easy target, in one of his first articles for The Boston Globe. In his review, we see a young, ambitious writer looking to cut his teeth and stake a claim.
“It’s always too big, too empty, too grand. There are too many things it doesn’t have enough of,” he said about Boston City Hall Plaza, namely “enormous sidewalk cafes,” “shouting street vendors,” or “in other words, life.” Campbell wanted to see it occupied by crowds, protests, celebrations, and “people making speeches about how the Communists are stealing our bodily fluids.” He believed good urban design is “based on the essential truth that cities are made of streets, not of isolated buildings surrounded by empty air.”
Boston City Hall Plaza circa 1970s (Boston City Hall Archives/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0)
Nevertheless, Campbell understood and appreciated Boston City Hall’s ambitions.
“Even if you’re in the majority who think City Hall in its present form is ugly, here’s a thought: Ugly people can be great. So can ugly buildings,” he remarked in 2008. “City Hall is powerful and memorable, with the rugged majesty of a fortress, or, closer to home, with the muscular grandeur of the famous generation of ‘Boston Granite Style’ commercial buildings of the late 19th century.” He was “a fan of this powerful, ugly-and-wonderful building,” and he looked “forward to the day when it gets the loving and inventive spruce-up it needs and deserves.”
Campbell’s postmodern romanticism was of its time, it echoes that old great comeback by Bob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Philip Johnson and Gordon Bunshaft once slighted VSBA’s work as “ugly and ordinary,” so Bob and Denise made trademark “UGLY AND ORDINARY” VSBA coffee mugs. We can trace similar ingenuity and indignation at elitism in Campbell’s oeuvre. The critic thankfully lived just long enough to see Mayor Michelle Wu designate Boston City Hall a landmark, and also the recent anti-Trump protests he hoped for.
The Pru Awards
Boston’s Prudential Tower by Charles Luckman opened in 1965—Campbell loathed it. “The Pru” for Campbell was a “symbol of bad design in Boston for so long that we’d probably miss it if it disappeared.” The mischievous sprite in the 1980s started handing out “the Pru Awards” annually to architects responsible for the city’s worst buildings. He compared the Pru’s facade to a storefront grate. Boston Then and Now was published with Vanderwalker in 1982.
Campbell used words as barbs, writing in 1983 that concrete in New England looks like “diseased oatmeal.” He said in 1995: “In the Boston of today, there’s a jostling of buildings of different eras, different heights, different styles. It’s as if the college basketball team and the eighth-grade drum-and-bugle corps were all crowding into the same elevator,” a “rude jostling” he called it. For Campbell, Boston’s idiosyncrasies made it “lively” and charged with “a syncopated rhythm.”
Another example of Campbell and Vanderwalker’s before-and-after approach. Pictured here is the transformation of Franklin Street. (Courtesy Peter Vanderwalker)
Cityscapes of Boston came in 1995, a collaboration with Vanderwalker. The book explored Boston’s architectural evolution, juxtaposing historical and contemporary photographs to illustrate the city’s transformation over time. In comparing Boston’s architectural legacies to the palimpsest of Rome, Campbell saw parallels: “Rome is deeply layered in time. So, by American standards, is Boston. We’ll keep it that way when we get mad about ugliness but, at the same time, live with it when it’s happened.”
“We started in ’82” Vanderwalker told AN. “And we made over 200 [articles for The Boston Globe] between then and 2005. I would research the old pictures and send them to him. And I never knew what he was going to write until I saw it in the paper. He shaped the way I look at architecture and cities because his writing was so clear. Robert wasn’t a warm and fuzzy guy. It was mostly shyness with a little bit of arrogance.”
Campbell won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1996. He was then awarded the architect-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. Accolades from the National Building Museum and American Academy of Arts and Science followed. He often contributed to Architectural Record by invitation of Robert Ivy. He won the 2018 Vincent Scully Prize together with Inga Saffron.
Campbell and Vanderwalker reconstructed Harry Houdini’s plunge into the Charles River. (Courtesy Peter Vanderwalker)
Public Responsibility
Vanderwalker and Campbell had fun when, in 2004, they reconstructed Harry Houdini’s plunge into the Charles River for a famous article, “Charles River Magic.” Vanderwalker used his bonafide before-and-after technique to show where the magician one stood, and show how the skyline had changed beyond, accompanied by Campbell’s waxing poetry.
In 2005, Kira Gould interviewed Campbell for AN. Campbell credited Ada Louise Huxtable with making architecture criticism popular around the country when he was just getting his start, and paving the way for more of it in legacy media publications like The Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News.
Campbell told Gould his other writing influences were Jane Jacobs, Randall Jarrell, George Bernard Shaw, Clement Greenberg, and Edmund Wilson. He also said he didn’t think of himself as an activist critic, although he admitted “activist criticism” can be a “positive force.” Weighing himself against Blair Kamin and Michael Sorkin, Campbell noted, “It is not my temperament to take that attitude, but it’s certainly a valid strategy.”
Campbell gave another interview in 2011 for Huffington Post about why architecture criticism matters, noting that architecture criticism is “different.” “It tries, at its best, to stimulate and participate in a conversation about the environments we create for ourselves and how we could perhaps make them better,” he said. “A critic’s responsibility is to the public.”
“It’s always fun to write about architecture in Boston,” Campbell said later in life. “People may hate it, they may love it, but they always seem to have an opinion. We care about the quality of the world we build.”
“The Central Artery” article (Courtesy Peter Vanderwalker)
The last architecture review Campbell wrote for The Boston Globe was in 2017—it was sprinkled with the insights of a wise sage. “An iconic building shouldn’t resemble any other, or it wouldn’t be iconic,” Campbell said about Northeastern University’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex. “I’m grateful for architecture that expresses so many ambitions. It would be nice if it happened more often.”
Indeed, Campbell will be remembered and cherished for writing about architecture in ways that made it comprehensible to Bostonians—that rowdy bunch with keen ears for both bullshit and poetry. That writing changed people’s opinions, started debates, and made us chuckle, all in service to the public good. His voice will be missed.
If anything, we need more Robert Campbells—critics who can translate the built environment into public language, who can hold designers, planners, and institutions accountable, and who remind us that cities are not just made of buildings, but of values.
Architecture needs interpreters. Civic life depends on it.
(Let’s bring back the Pru Awards.)
Chris Grimley is a graphic designer and founder of SIGNALS, based in Boston. As an author and graphic designer he has developed books on architecture and photography monographs, archival surveys, the complex legacy of urban renewal, including Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston (The Monacelli Press, 2015); Imagining the Modern: Architecture and Urbanism of the Pittsburgh Renaissance (The Monacelli Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Late Modernism and Other Latenesses: Architecture, Materials, and Media After Time (Park Books 2026).
Like Kubo, Robert Campbell was the first architecture critic AN news editor Dan Jonas Roche, another Boston boy, read.
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