Join Mark Lamster, the Pulitzer Prize winning architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News, for a conversation about his new book, Welcome to Paradox City (La Reunion Publishing, 2026), and the state of criticism today. Lamster will be joined in conversation by Karrie Jacobs. Together, they'll discuss:what is the role of the architecture critic in today’s environment? Does criticism have a future, and if so, what should it look like? How is Lamster’s book, a critical history of Dallas told through its buildings, a replicable critical model?

In this wide ranging discussion, two of America’s leading critics discuss and debate the future of criticism, and architecture itself.

About the Book:
With an exceptional blend of architectural history, social history, and critical writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Lamster takes readers to the sun-scorched origins of Dallas as a remote outpost on the Texas frontier, then traces the city's development into the dynamic, if imperfect, metropolis we know today. Welcome to Paradox City is an illuminating, illustrated look at the often-invisible ways that architecture shapes a city and its culture from its founding, to the present, and onward into the future.

Speakers:
Mark Lamster, Architecture Critic, Dallas Morning News
Karrie Jacobs, Architecture Writer, Critic

About the Speakers:
Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News and the winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 2021, he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for Arts Journalism, and in 2017 a Loeb fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is the author of several books, including The Man in the Glass House, a biography of the late architect Philip Johnson, which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

Karrie Jacobs is a professional observer of the manmade landscape. Her recent writing has appeared in The Nation, the New York Review of Architecture, Curbed and the anthology, the Education of a Design Writer (Allworth Press, 2025). She’s a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts’ MA program in Design Research, Writing, and Criticism and was the founding editor-in-chief of Dwell and the founding executive editor of Benetton's Colors. She is the author of The Perfect $100,000 House (2006) and coauthor of Angry Graphics (1992).