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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DOHA MEDIA CONTACT
Leslie Gryce Sturino
+974 4454 5141
l-­‐sturino@northwestern.edu
Architecture and media on tap with speakers at NU-­‐Q
Education City, Doha, Qatar – November 6, 2011 – In the face of ever-­‐expanding city limits,
Doha’s greatest challenge is to build a real urban fabric and do away with the notion of
buildings as isolated floating islands, critically-­‐acclaimed author Paul Goldberger said during a
special talk at Northwestern University in Qatar.
“So how does Doha become more like a real city where people live together?” he asked the
audience on Tuesday, November 1 st , answering, “When there’s an actual incentive to walk, and
there’s the sense that everything is part of the larger whole. You don’t feel that now,” said the
architecture critic for The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize-­‐winning author, engaging NU-­‐Q
students on the subject of architecture as news and information.
The well-­‐received talk was one in a series of events designed to bring Northwestern’s
excellence in liberal arts education to Qatar.
“Doha’s greatest challenge –both here at Education City and in West Bay and every other
region of the city -­‐ is to begin to build a real urban fabric and not to see buildings as isolated
objects,” said Goldberger in the public-­‐interview-­‐format discussion led by NU-­‐Q dean, Everette
E. Dennis.
This neglect to see cities as a “larger whole”, Goldberger noted, has been an obvious failing in
societies around the world in the 20 th and early 21 st centuries. Time, he concedes, plays its own
role in shaping a city.
“For all that we like to think that geography and culture play a huge role in architecture and
urbanism, I’m not sure that time doesn’t play an even more powerful role… you know, the age
in which a place grows up.”
In advice to students on writing about architecture, Goldberger emphasized a critic’s
responsibility to be as direct and conclusive as possible-­‐ admitting to having written a negative
piece about IM PEI’s Louvre project in Paris when it was first announced. He has since
recognized the error in his assessment.
P.O. Box 34102 | Education City | Doha, Qatar
T +974 4454 5000 | F +974 4454 5180 | www.qatar.northwestern.edu

Architecture, he noted, is a powerful setting for one’s personal and work life, and has an
inextricable emotional component.
“So listen to that voice inside of yourself. Your own sensibility is very important,” said
Goldberger.
Goldberger was visiting Doha to deliver the opening keynote address at the 4 th biennial Hamad
Bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art held recently at the Museum of Islamic Arts and
sponsored by Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar and others.
Jesús Escobar on parallels between Madrid in its “Golden Century” and Doha today
Last week, NU-­‐Q also hosted Dr. Jesùs Escobar, chair of Northwestern University’s Art History
Department in Evanston, Illinois, who spoke to students on how architecture and politics
interact to shape city design.
In the context of a discussion that asked, “Why study architecture and the city?” the speaker
offered a case study of the European metropolis as a prelude to a discussion that ranged from
architecture as an instrument of power—and how rulers from ancient times to the modern day
have used architecture as a practical and symbolic solution in building nations.
The second speaker in a new lecture and discussion series at Northwestern University in Qatar
called “The Evanston Experience: Great Teachers from Northwestern University,” Escobar
lectured on “The Plaza and the Grid: The Design of Cities in the Early Modern Spanish World.
Escobar is chair of Northwestern University’s Art History Department in Evanston, Illinois.
“Because we look at Madrid today as a city of 3.5 million people, we think it’s always been a big
city. But it was a very small town in 1561 when it was chosen to become the capital of Spain
and within 40 years it became one of the largest cities of Europe. So the transformation is
phenomenal. And that kind of transformation is one that I think is not too different from what
you are living here,” said Escobar, who has written extensively about Madrid of 16 th and 17 th
centuries, termed Madrid’s “Golden Century.”
-­‐-­‐ ENDS -­‐-­‐
About Northwestern University in Qatar
Northwestern University in Qatar, which started accepting students in 2008, is a partnership of
Northwestern’s highly esteemed School of Communication and Medill School of Journalism with the
Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development. At its campus in Doha,
Northwestern University in Qatar offers undergraduate degree programs in communication and
journalism – fields that are rapidly changing, are of enormous social importance, and that offer
P.O. Box 34102 | Education City | Doha, Qatar
T +974 4454 5000 | F +974 4454 5180 | www.qatar.northwestern.edu

abundant and exciting career opportunities. Northwestern University is ranked #12 by U.S. News &
World Report. For more information, please visit http://www.qatar.northwestern.edu/.
Northwestern University is ranked #12 among all U.S. universities by US News & World Report.
About Paul Goldberger
Paul Goldberger is the Architecture Critic for The New Yorker, where since 1997 he has written the
magazine’s celebrated “Sky Line” column. He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and
Architecture at The New School in New York City. He was formerly Dean of the Parsons school of design,
a division of The New School. He began his career at The New York Times, where in 1984 his architecture
criticism was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest award in journalism.
He is the author of several books, most recently Why Architecture Matters, published in 2009 by Yale
University Press; Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture, a collection of
his architecture essays published in 2009 by Monacelli Press, and Christo and Jeanne-­‐Claude, published
in 2010 by Taschen. In 2008 Monacelli published Beyond the Dunes: A Portrait of the Hamptons, which
he produced in association with the photographer Jake Rajs. Paul Goldberger’s chronicle of the process
of rebuilding Ground Zero, entitled UP FROM ZERO: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New
York, which was published by Random House in the fall of 2004, and brought out in a new, updated
paperback edition in 2005, was named one of The New York Times Notable Books for 2004. Paul
Goldberger has also written The City Observed: New York, The Skyscraper, On the Rise: Architecture and
Design in a Post-­‐Modern Age, Above New York, and The World Trade Center Remembered.
About Jesús Escobar
Jesús Escobar (Ph.D., 1996, Princeton; Associate Professor) is a specialist in the art, architecture, and
urbanism of early modern Spain, Italy, and the Spanish world. His book The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping
of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge University Press, 2003; paper, 2009) explores the interchange of
architecture and politics in the evolution of Madrid from a secondary city of Castile to the seat of a
global empire. The book won the Eleanor Tufts Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art
Historical Studies and was published in a Spanish-­‐language edition in 2008 by Editorial Nerea. Professor
Escobar is currently at work on a book project tentatively titled “Architecture and Empire in
Seventeenth-­‐Century Madrid,” which examines buildings and public spaces in early modern Madrid
within the context of developments in architecture, urbanism, and imperial governance in the larger
Spanish world. Other current research projects focus on the historiography of the baroque in Spain and
seventeenth-­‐century royal palaces in Madrid, Mexico City, and Lima.
Professor Escobar serves as Editor for the scholarly book series, Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies,
published by Penn State University Press and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of
P.O. Box 34102 | Education City | Doha, Qatar
T +974 4454 5000 | F +974 4454 5180 | www.qatar.northwestern.edu