Inga Saffron

Inga Saffron is the Architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Read Inga's blog Changing Skyline
Latest post: Gardening the City - 05/20/2013
Email Inga at isaffron@phillynews.com

The planner with the city at his fingertips, 1947. Biographer Heller sees Bacon primarily as a design visionary with a deep understanding of how cities ought to look and function. His greatest strength was as a "marketer of ideas."

Changing Skyline: An urban design legend

A new biography of the great city planner is welcome and timely amid today's visions of urban design.

By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

05/23/2013

Philadelphia is a city that struggles with certain disadvantages. It is not easy being stuck midway between the nation's financial and political capitals. It doesn't regularly produce winning sports teams. We don't have enough corporate giants headquartered here, or enough of the philanthropists who trail in their wake.

Gallery: Philly's new skateboard park
Lifeless parking garage slows city's pulse
New Cheesecake Factory at 15th and Walnut is 'visually sublime'

Changing Skyline: >Inquirer.com 05/16/2013: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

To see more photos of Paine's Park, go to www.inquirer.com/skate
Changing Skyline: City steering to bike sharing 05/10/2013: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Philadelphia didn't need Bicycling magazine to confirm that it is one of America's best biking cities (No. 17 on its 2012 list). You can see it every day on the streets: The steady stream of commuters sluicing down Center City's bike lanes. The tangle of bikes hitched to U-shaped racks and bike corrals. (More, please.) The proliferation of neighborhood bike shops.
Zoning board undermines city planning 05/03/2013: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

What makes Philadelphia's new zoning code such a landmark policy is that it embraces the modern view of cities first articulated by such urbanists as Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte. They understood that cities couldn't survive with fortified streets and blank ground floors. In the spirit of that movement, the code took the bold step of banning a particular local scourge: garage-fronted rowhouses.
Changing Skyline: Retail magic missing from Kensington lofts proposal 04/26/2013: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

On paper, the proposed Soko Lofts project promises to do for its South Kensington neighborhood what the Piazza at Schmidts did for Northern Liberties. Like its paradigm-shifting predecessor two blocks south, Soko Lofts would rim its large block with a dense array of mid-rise apartment buildings, smartly broken up into manageable segments. The spaces between the buildings would become passageways, beckoning the public into a landscaped interior courtyard.
Reviewing the 'plans' for Philly's second casino 04/19/2013: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Philadelphia's recent casino hearings brought back memories of those giddy days in 2006 when gambling was new to Pennsylvania and no amenity was too extravagant for our city's gaming halls. Once again, the applicants vied to seduce us with all kinds of extras. A 320-room resort hotel! Spas! Bike paths! Fishing piers! Skating rink! Luxury shops! A starchitect design!
Cool, new housing for 'working poor' teachers 04/15/2013: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

It's easy to imagine the sprawling 19th-century brick mill on South Kensington's Howard Street as just another high-end apartment complex for twentysomething professionals, the newest outpost on Philadelphia's ever-advancing frontier of gentrification.
A billboard puts Philly apartment tower on hold 04/12/2013: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Any number of obstacles can kill a high-rise project in Philadelphia. Usually it's money. Construction costs can run as high as New York's, yet rents remain much lower here, the margins smaller. Tall towers frequently get ensnared in politics, especially when a neighborhood group is nervous about having more people around.
Glaxo at Navy Yard will change the way we work 04/05/2013: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Changing Skyline: You know you're not in the usual Big Pharma bunker as soon as you step inside the atrium and are blasted with natural light and jelly-bean colors.
Petition seeks redress for architect wronged 04/02/2013: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Twenty-two years later, the omission still rankles Philadelphia architect Denise Scott Brown. She and her husband, Robert Venturi, designed their projects together. They wrote several paradigm-shifting books together. They taught their influential studio classes together. But when the winner of architecture's most prestigious prize was announced in 1991, it was only Venturi who was honored.
Wrong way to spend $1 billion 03/29/2013: By Inga Saffron, Inquirer Architecture Critic

Back in 2010, Gov. Christie shocked transportation experts when he canceled construction of a new rail tunnel to Manhattan, one of the nation's busiest routes. Christie argued the state couldn't afford its part of the tab, $3 billion to $5 billion, for relieving the rail congestion.