Is there a Right to Gatekeep?

Kate Wagner is a current architecture critic that has no training in architecture. Her blunt honesty and straightforward style of writing is appealing and engaging but admittedly frustrating to the one who has dedicated a significant portion of their life to study what an individual seemingly without any knowledge critiques on a large platform. Gaining notoriety from the blog “McMansion Hell” a satirical and truly funny collection of observations from the nightmare compilations that are early 2000s suburban mansions. The comical but truth holding blog spiraled/expanded into Wagner’s position as the architecture correspondent for The Nation. Wagner’s writing was brought to my mind when reading De Carlo’s “Architecture is too important to be left to the architect” (part of “Architecture’s Public). I see Wagner as the extreme of what De Carlo wrote. The main difference of the two being input and collaboration, what I believe De Carlo intended, and then direction and instruction, how I perceive Wagner’s writing. Oh, and the other main difference - Giancarlo De Carlo had architecture training and education. This beg’s the question can and should our current day discourse on architecture be directed and guided by those without architectural training? Or is partnership of the designer, the user, and the builder the ideal as De Carlo puts forth?

Wagner claims that everyone has a right to critic architecture because everyone has experienced and lived in architecture. It sounds freeing, but I struggle to accept it. 

I believe very strongly that architecture is for everyone and that most of us are architecture critics in our own right, from the umarells in Italy—old men who stand around and watch construction sites—to my mother watching HGTV and disagreeing with how a particular renovation turned out…
I don’t like it when people approach me and start their sentences with “I didn’t study architecture, but…” So? Every time you protest rising rents or living conditions, or even just inhabit the commons as a citizen, that’s participating in architecture. Every time you move, rent an apartment, renovate, or decorate, that’s participating in architecture. Reading a blog, scrolling through Zillow, picking up a guide and trying to identify houses in your neighborhood—that’s participating in architecture, too.

- Kate Wagner, “Stop Gatekeeping Architecture”, 2023