In the United States, few cultural audiences are as poorly served these days as those with an interest in architecture, design, and the life of cities. As the number of architecture critics employed by newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets continues to shrink, readers are left with a polarized set of options for understanding the trajectory and impact of the field: credulous and promotional coverage that is often hard to distinguish from a press release on end of the spectrum and anonymous, often deeply cynical meme accounts on the other. What is increasingly missing is carefully considered, deeply informed critical writing on architecture and related fields that is distinct from both marketing and snark. This gap is precisely what Punch List was created to fill, by providing weekly critical dispatches that cover not just new buildings by prominent firms but architecture culture in the broadest sense.

Christopher Hawthorne is an architecture critic and founder and editor of Punch List, an architecture newsletter and website. He is senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture, with a secondary appointment at Yale in English. Previously he was chief design officer for the city of Los Angeles (2018–22) and architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times (2004–18). He has regularly contributed critical writing to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Harvard Design Magazine, among many other publications. With Alanna Stang, he is author of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). His honors include two Los Angeles-area Emmy Awards for his public-television documentary work; a Mid-Career Fellowship from Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program; and a residency in criticism at the American Academy in Rome. He earned a bachelor’s degree with honors from Yale College, where he studied political philosophy and architectural history.