Inga Saffron

Inga Saffron is the Architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Read Inga's blog Skyline Online
Latest post: One Small Step for the Delaware Waterfront - 06/26/2009
Email Inga at isaffron@phillynews.com

Baltimore Avenue´s new pedestrian-scaled sidewalk lamps cast a cozy luster. Other neighborhoods want the better lighting. But the city is ambivalent about giving up its harsher, car-focused cobra lights, especially in the current budget crisis.

Changing Skyline: Let there be pedestrian light

By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Posted 2:06am

The right lighting does wonders for an old city like Philadelphia. Just look at Baltimore Avenue, where a column of new street lamps is positioned among the fledgling sidewalk restaurants and secondhand shops. Come nightfall, the aspiring hipster hangout is dusted with a fairy glow that makes even the vacant storefronts look good.

A home that's a work in progress
The 'Mangia' Garden
Cheat Sheet: Some factors to consider in picking a clothes dryer
One Small Step for the Delaware Waterfront

Changing Skyline: 'Final' Dilworth plan shouldn't be - 06/19/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Most public space projects in Philadelphia tend to stew for years, so let's give the Center City District credit for placing its redesign of City Hall's plaza on a fast track. The drawings started making the rounds of Philadelphia's various design commissions earlier this year. Now, the CCD has released its "final" design for Dilworth Plaza.
Changing Skyline: Attacking asphalt - 06/12/2009: By greening its playground, Greenfield School is fighting back against the damage that gunk-laden storm water does in a paved city.

By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

No matter how many times we've heard Philadelphia described as William Penn's "greene countrie towne," we know the reality is rather different. Cities are cities because once-verdant land is relentlessly paved and covered over time. That's how we civilize our world.
Changing Skyline: River is testing Lower Merion, too - 06/05/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Philadelphia's struggle to coax walkable, urban neighborhoods from the fallow land near its two rivers is a much-told tale, filled more with disappointment than triumph. But it's a mistake to think this is a uniquely Philadelphia story. Lower Merion's got waterfront troubles, too.
Changing Skyline: New avian center's exterior offers no flights of whimsy - 05/22/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

We visit the zoo so we can experience wild animals in captivity, but the side benefit is that we also get to enjoy the architecture. Since these menageries are fantasy environments, zoo buildings are liberated from their usual social obligations. They can be almost anything they want to be.
Changing Skyline: A nonconformist's development coup - 05/15/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Unlike most real estate developers, Bart Blatstein is a seat-of-the-pants sort of guy. If he comes up with a really cool idea in the middle of the night - Hey! Let's re-create Rome's Piazza Navona in Philadelphia! - he runs with it. Since he has an aversi
Changing Skyline: Building a McMini - 05/08/2009: It’s the antithesis of the McMansion. Chad Ludeman’s handsome homes are the smallest, most energy-efficient, and lowest priced he can build.

By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

In real estate, the conventional wisdom holds that home buyers should shoot for the largest house they can afford. But even before the foreclosure crisis trickled up to million-dollar McMansions, developer Chad Ludeman sensed that this chestnut was moldy.
Changing Skyline: And the winner is: A no-design design - 05/01/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

It was always understood that the citizen effort to improve the design of the new South Street Bridge was a long shot. For years, city engineers treated the Schuylkill project as if it were just a routine repair job and outsourced the work to a highway specialist. But when Mayor Nutter authorized an eleventh-hour design review last spring, he kindled hopes that the city might get the signature gateway it deserves.
Changing Skyline: Modernist gems of the Great Northeast - 04/24/2009: A local photographer records the exuberant design that arose amid the cookie-cutter blandness of a bedroom community.

By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

As we're starting to recognize, the middle years of the 20th century were a hugely inventive time in American architecture. Stoked with confidence from the nation's victory in World War II, our designers took high-minded European modernism on an American joyride, erecting fanciful crystal palaces on suburban highways, sculpting shapely government buildings out of concrete, and walloping neon brushstrokes across humble storefronts.
Changing Skyline: Some waterfront lessons from the City by the Bay - 04/17/2009: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

On the same day last week that SugarHouse released its revised design for a big-box casino on the Delaware waterfront, I was strolling through San Francisco's new Mission Bay neighborhood, eyes wide and mouth agape.
Architecture Review An art palace well suited to Philadelphia - 09/07/2007: The Perelman addition, meant to relieve the pressure on the museum’s overstuffed main building, takes modesty and restraint to a level rarely seen in major art venues.

By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

In the Art Museum's new Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, Philadelphia has at last acquired a modern civic building that is a true Philadelphian.