Death of former Washington Post columnist Roger Lewis

Roger Lewis was an architect and consultant on community design matters, and professor at the University of Maryland.  

The way most anyone has heard of his is that he wrote a newspaper column running in the Washington Post Real Estate section for many years, starting in the mid-1980s, called "Shaping the City." and he wrote about "good urbanism."  

He often drew a cartoon to accompany the column.

-- Obituary

At the time, his column, along with a then similar column in the Washington City Paper, educated me a lot about good urbanism--I was always into cities but after 1972, except for a stint in Ann Arbor, I lived in the suburbs, until I moved to DC in 1987.

I only interacted with him once, on the Design Review Committee for the 11th Street Bridge Park Project, aimed at adding park space to the city, a premier project across the river, connecting Capitol Hill and Anacostia and East of the River and West of the River. He was a great resource.

-- "Revisiting the 11th Street Bridge Park project as an opportunity rather than a folly: a new revitalization agenda for East of the River, DC"

His column was dropped in 2022.  When I met him he said over the yeas, some Post editors were into the column, others indifferent.  

But because architecture and especially historic architecture is one of defining characteristics, it's a shame that the Post has very little writing on architecture and urban design these days--although it's typical of newspapers across the country as they've downsized as a result of circulation losses.

In the US, besides writers at the New York Times, Inga Saffron at the Philadelphia Inquirer and John King at the San Francisco Chronicle are the two consistent writers on urban design.  But King is retiring, so it will be interesting to see if he is replaced with another top notch writer.

Christopher Knight, the art critic at the Los Angeles Times, writes a lot about architecture too, especially since his counterpart as architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, left the paper a few yeas ago.