Right now over at the Nasher, they’re wrapping up UTA’s David Dillon Symposium. I didn’t get to attend as much of the two-day affair as I’d like to have, but this afternoon’s “Criticism Today” talk was time well spent. During a break in the action, a few of us stepped outside and into the garden so that the visiting dignitaries could see with their own eyes the glare coming off Museum Tower. Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer-winning architecture critic who just left The New Yorker to join Vanity Fair, was mightily impressed by the tower’s power to reflect heat and light. Looking up at it through his dark sunglasses, he said, “That looks like Sauron’s Dark Tower in Mordor, from Lord of the Rings.”
Actually, that’s a lie. Goldberger didn’t say that. That’s what our creative director, Todd Johnson, said when we were working on cover lines for our story about Museum Tower. But if Goldberger were as big a sci-fi dork as our creative director, he could have said that.
