Aaron Seward: Some of our readers might not know you or your background, so could you give us a brief history of how you got into design journalism?

Cathleen McGuigan: After college, I began freelancing for newspapers and little magazines. Then I came to New York and worked at Newsweek, which was great training in journalism. I started as a researcher for the art critic and the architecture critic. I liked interviewing architects because they were good talkers—they have to know how to sell their projects to clients, and in that way aren’t like artists, who often can be at a loss for words. And though I continued to write about various aspects of culture, I kind of revived the architecture beat at the magazine, long after the old critic had left.

I spent a year at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) as a Loeb Fellow and learned so much more about the field—before that, I used to say that I was practicing architectural journalism without a license. At the GSD, I could indulge in my longtime interest in the evolution of cities and in urban design. I wrote a series of big stories on cities for Newsweek, such as Barcelona preparing for the ‘92 Olympics, and the transition of Berlin from a divided city to the new capital of a united Germany, exploring not only new architecture but how the politics and history of Germany would be reflected in the renewed city. And then for seven years I was also the arts editor, running all the cultural coverage.

I knew Architectural Record, of course— and felt very honored to be offered the editor in chief job in 2011. I was able to bring experience both as a journalist covering the field and as an editor, managing a staff.

AS: It’s interesting that you started at Newsweek, which is obviously a general-interest publication with a broad readership, and then moved to Record, which is a specialized publication with mainly an audience of architects. Did that affect the way you approached journalism? Or do you feel like there was a continuum in terms of the way you cover the subject?

CM: Both. We absolutely have a primary audience of architects, and what we write is at a more sophisticated and professional level than what I did at Newsweek, where, as you say, I was explaining architecture and urbanism to a more general audience. At Record we focus, of course, on what matters to architects, such as structure and materials. That was a learning curve for me. The first piece I wrote for Record was on the Rothschild Bank in London designed by Ellen van Loon of OMA. I was going to be edited by Suzanne Stephens; she is a great editor, and though I was technically her boss, I was terrified I was going to say something stupid or get something wrong. I really worked on reporting the details of the structure and the construction, which was interesting because the building is inserted into an almost impossibly tight site behind a beautiful little Christopher Wren church. It was fun to write about, but challenging because we have such high standards for getting everything right.

I brought wider journalistic interests to Record too. I was thinking about identifying trends in the field and also about the larger context of architecture and the question of how we could bring the social and political aspects that surround building to our readers.

AS: Where did you find the architecture profession when you started editing Record? How have you seen the profession change over these years?

CM: In the last decade, we’ve been living through an interesting period in architecture where concerns about urbanism, social issues, and sustainability have grown dramatically. When I was writing about architecture for Newsweek in the late 1980s, critics were mostly writing about buildings as objects, and architects were designing buildings as objects. And though they still are—and that’s fine—our values have changed. Not just in terms of energy savings but also considering the embodied carbon of materials, how design and construction affect the climate crisis, and how architects can have a positive impact. Equity of the public realm and the idea that design is for everybody is something that the whole profession has become more conscious of. We have extensively covered women in architecture, and though I think we’ve not seen enough change, there is still quite significant progress for women advancing in firms and in closing the pay gap, especially after the #MeToo movement erupted. And after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, we had a whole new movement looking at how poorly architecture often serves communities of color and how little representation people of color have in the profession.

AS: From our point of view at AN, there’s also a desire to have more representation from different voices in architectural journalism and criticism. Do you see that that’s changed much at Record?

CM: I feel that the young journalists really help refresh our vantage point. One of our young reporters actively covered the architecture unionization movement, and she and one of her peers are especially sensitive to issues of gender and race. This is what’s so great about having a robust website. On the one hand, we’re putting out a monthly magazine that’s very carefully considered, and at the same time we’re essentially running a daily newspaper online, and this gives us the ability to cover a wide spectrum of issues, news, and terrific architectural projects.