Inga Saffron

Inga Saffron is the Architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Read Inga's blog Changing Skyline
Latest post: Developer unveils $100M plan for Spectrum land - 07/21/2009
Email Inga at isaffron@phillynews.com

Gallery: Powering down
Ground breaking to begin on Penn Project
Cataloging the barn stars of Penna.

Gallery: Changing Skyline: Pedaling in a lane that's their own
YouTube: Bicycle Coalition video of the Pine Street bike lane
Web site: Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia

Changing Skyline: A design that's a teaching tool - 10/23/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

How to instill moral values in America's youth is one topics that is guaranteed to start a spirited conversation. Religious groups, of course, have always been big on teaching the difference between right and wrong. Others argue that you can't have the discussion without talking about ethical behavior, compassion, or economic justice.
Changing Skyline: Perking up the Parkway - 10/16/2009: Even before the Barnes arrives, major landscaping projects will transform the area to make it more pleasing to pedestrians.

By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

From the moment that the Barnes Foundation decided to move to Philadelphia, the arrangement was cast as a perfect marriage of interests. The Barnes would become financially sustainable in a new home on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The city would finally get a lively cultural attraction to occupy a primo spot on that great boulevard of dead space.
Changing Skyline: Phila. architects offer some homegrown ideas - 10/09/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

It's not a new story, but the biggest and best architectural projects in Philadelphia always seem to end up in the hands of out-of-towners. The Barnes Foundation has a New York firm designing its new home. The Art Museum went to Los Angeles to snare Frank Gehry for its underground expansion. Even Drexel University chose a Minneapolis outfit to retrofit Market Street's iconic decorated shed, the ISI Building, one of Robert Venturi's important early works.
Changing Skyline Changing Skyline: Proving green can be gorgeous - 10/02/2009: City's soon-to-open Hotel Palomar is luxe and stylish - without the toxic fumes.

By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

You can be pretty sure that the smell you smell in most fancy new hotels in America is not the scent of money. More likely, it's a gassy brew of glue, formaldehyde, and ethylene, sublimating off the walls, floors, and furniture and into the guest-room air.
Changing Skyline: Erdy McHenry's new Drexel dorm ambitious, flawed - 09/25/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

The rap in Philadelphia on Erdy McHenry Architects is that their buildings are show-offs. They're too stylish, too trendy. They lack real depth. You don't want to look too closely at the details, either.
Changing Skyline: Subtle subterfuge - 09/18/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Philadelphia has not been lucky with parking garages. Architects are always promising to dress up these concrete monsters so they're indistinguishable from the other buildings on the city's streets. Has anyone ever been fooled?
Changing Skyline: Time to play hardball on site for Foxwoods - 09/11/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

The old-boys club known as the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (yes, they're all men) hardly seems equipped to be making crucial decisions about land use in Philadelphia.
Changing Skyline: Getting a bird's-eye view of the trees - 08/28/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Some structures change the way you look at architecture. Others make you see the world in a new way. A recent example of the latter is New York's High Line park. A large part of the attraction of the newly landscaped railroad viaduct is that it offers us a fresh vantage for viewing the urban jungle. You're above the fray, but not by much. Closer to home,
Changing Skyline: One more masterpiece by Kahn nears reality - 08/23/2009: A memorial to FDR designed by the late Philadelphia architectural giant is almost set to be built in New York.

By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

As a boy growing up in Philadelphia, Nathaniel Kahn remembers, he watched in fascination as his famous father, Louis Kahn, tinkered with a large architectural model of a park at the tip of an island. His mother, landscape architect Harriet Pattison, was there, too, fussing with the design. Kahn loved to imagine himself inside the model, playing among the tiny trees that bordered a triangular lawn.
Changing Skyline: Renovation keeps an icon its singular, 'ordinary' self - 08/21/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Guild House, the Spring Garden Street apartment house designed by Robert Venturi, has just come through its first major renovation since it opened 43 years ago, and miraculously, no one laid a hand on the original chain-link fence or tried to pep up the color of the balcony railings.