Pulitzer Prize winner Alexandra Lange is doing genre-expanding journalism
She explained to us the process of writing her 7-part series about how to create public spaces that allow children and communities to thrive
In the last couple of weeks I've interviewed both a Pulitzer Prize winner and a Pulitzer Prize finalist who approached op-ed and editorial writing, respectively, in ways that I am not used to.
When I think of those, I think of a 'state the opinion, support the opinion, and get out of the way' approach.
But this is 2025 and not what I learned in college in the mid-1990s. Things are different.
This week's podcast guest is Alexandra Lange, a design critic, who won the Pulitzer for criticism for a seven-article series for Bloomberg CityLab "writing about public spaces for families, deftly using interviews, observations and analysis to consider the architectural components that allow children and communities to thrive."
Her advice to aspiring writers
"I think editorial writers, op-ed writers should use more feature writing tools and use the voices of other people to help tell whatever story they want to tell,"
Early in the conversation, when asked about her writing being referred to as genre-expanding, she said:
" Many of the early critics were writing for an urban paper, primarily about what was happening in their city. A lot of their pieces focused on specific projects and specific buildings. That was how the profession was practiced for a long time. But as architecture criticism has been published in more different kinds of publications and more of it moved online, the idea of making it so specific to one city and one building no longer made so much sense because your audience could potentially be anywhere.
Other people besides me have started to think about architecture criticism more thematically and include more different projects in a piece and also move it away from focusing on famous architects and famous buildings."
For this series, Alexandra wrote about playgrounds and skate parks, immersive museums, courtyards, a mental health facility, and fun and romance of the swings.
To share her perspective on how Alexandra thinks, of the swings she said:
"The idea that you can make a  swing into something that creates all different types of social encounters and actually kind of, activates different muscles, different parts of the body, was really fascinating to me."
Alexandra makes use of her doctorate degree and her experiences as a parent. And she shares the views of others in whatever atmosphere she's writing about.
" When I am going to a place to evaluate it for a story, I really start with the experience of the place and experiential knowledge," Lange said. "Another really well known architecture critic of the past, Lewis Mumford, referred to himself as a sidewalk critic. That gives you the basic of an approach. I'm always thinking about
What's the sidewalk leading up to the playground?
What is the gate like? Is it hard to operate?
Is it all, like a smooth surface that would be easy to cover with a stroller?
Are there benches?
Is there shade?
It's ticking off in my mind that I've had as the parent of now-teenagers, but also just knowing the steps that it's important for any design to go through so that people are comfortable and it's usable."
The result of this approach to writing is a highly-accessible series to read. I read all the stories in one sitting. You can find the link to the series here. It's well worth a read. And please give a listen to my interview with Alexandra on the podcast too!
We'll revisit the subject of expanding what op-ed and editorial writing can be in the near future in my interview with Pulitzer finalist Marcela Garcia, an associate editor and columnist for The Boston Globe.