Latest news with #RobertCampbell
New York Times
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Robert Campbell, Architecture Critic in Love With Boston, Dies at 88
Robert Campbell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic of The Boston Globe who for more than 40 years wrote with clarity, wit and, yes, love about a city in transition, died on April 29 at an assisted living facility in Cambridge, Mass. He was 88. The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his son, Nick Campbell, said. Mr. Campbell began writing for The Globe in 1973, a heady time in Boston. The era of slum clearance, or so-called urban renewal, was ending, and suddenly there was an interest in preservation. While the scars of that urban renewal — both social and physical — remained, the city was starting to turn itself around. Mr. Campbell's mission 'was to make sure that Boston recovered properly,' Alex Krieger, a professor emeritus of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, said in an interview. 'Not that he would put it that way.' Mr. Krieger continued: 'He loved cities more than he loved architecture, and that made him an important figure in describing architecture in terms of its impact, positive and negative, upon the city. He didn't mince words. He was a kind of gentle scold.' Of the 'ungainly and airless' Leverett Saltonstall State Building, in the government district, he wrote, 'The Saltonstall Building is to architecture what H.R. Haldeman is to statesmanship.' (It was June 1973, and the Watergate hearings were in full swing.) Of the vast and grim City Hall Plaza, which he likened to an empty parking lot or the site of a Nazi rally, he wrote: 'It's always too big, too empty, too grand. There are too many things it doesn't have enough of' — by which he meant 'enormous sidewalk cafes with parasols over the tables' and 'shouting street vendors selling eggplants and knishes' and 'people making speeches about how the Communists are stealing our bodily fluids.' He concluded: 'In other words, life.' Yet he approved of the Brutalist monument — or horror, to many Bostonians — that was City Hall. 'Even if you're in the majority who think City Hall in its present form is ugly, here's a thought: Ugly people can be great. So can ugly buildings,' he wrote in 2008. 'City Hall is powerful and memorable, with the rugged majesty of a fortress, or, closer to home, with the muscular grandeur of the famous generation of 'Boston Granite Style' commercial buildings of the late 19th century.' Although Mr. Campbell was a practicing architect, he wrote not for those in the ivory tower but for the citizens of Boston. He was instructive without being pedagogic or preachy. He was never pretentious, nor was he folksy. He abhorred jargon — a staple of architecture-speak — and bureaucratic myopia. He believed in preservation, but he was no reactionary or regressive. In person, he was flinty and astringent and a little shy. 'He was not pining for the golden age of Classical architecture,' Mr. Krieger said. 'He was just as critical of people who were trying to mimic history as he was of the modernists who seemed ignorant of the longstanding attributes of urban places.' 'Reviewing a building is a little disconcerting,' Mr. Campbell declared in one of his earliest columns. 'It doesn't make sense to treat a building as you would a book or a movie. No one needs a review to tell him whether to see or buy a building. Worse yet, no one can define where a building begins or ends. It doesn't have a frame around it.' It was how a building fit into its surroundings — how it elevated or disrupted or ignored them — that mattered to him. 'Architecture is the art of making places, not primarily an art of making things,' he wrote. 'It's the art of using buildings and landscape to shape space. A place can be your bedroom or your street or your neighborhood, a garden or a park or a city. It can be any space that human beings have created for habitation. The best city is the one with the most livable places.' As he wrote in 1985, 'Good urban design is based on the essential truth that cities are made of streets, not of isolated buildings surrounded by empty air.' Take skyscrapers, which he divided into two categories, the Diva and the Dagwood, in a 2015 column. 'The Diva, self-centered, ignores everything that's around it,' he wrote, citing as an example the hulking 1960s-era Prudential Building in the Back Bay neighborhood. 'It stands, or rather poses, like an opera star on an empty stage. A Diva is usually set back from the street, behind empty space in the form of a lawn or a plaza.' He continued: 'Developers often praise such space as a gift to pedestrians, but that's hogwash. A plaza isn't there for the people, it's there to show off the Diva, or at best fulfill some bureaucrat's square-foot calculations of required open space. No matter how elegantly they might be paved or planted, urban plazas are boring, windy and little used.' A Dagwood, unlike a Diva, bellies up to its neighbors, resembling, in Mr. Campbell's view, three buildings stacked atop one another, which reminded him of the 'absurdly tall' sandwiches favored by Dagwood Bumstead, from the long-running comic strip 'Blondie.' The bottom bit, Mr. Cambell wrote, is 'the part of the tower that lives in the human world, shaping the street space and nurturing pedestrian vitality.' Mr. Campbell was instinctively pro-Dagwood, but he did love the John Hancock Tower, the shimmering edifice designed by Henry Cobb, who worked with I.M. Pei. A dazzling Diva, he called it, although he added the caveat that 'a city of Hancocks would be monotonous and inhuman.' It was for his writing about the Hancock, among other columns, that he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1996. The tower had been beset by all sorts of mishaps, notoriously the failure of its windows, which began blowing off while it was still under construction in 1973. The Plywood Palace, people called it. Mr. Campbell called it a 'haunted high-rise mirror, which always seems to be reflecting clouds as if it were brooding on its own grim beginnings.' Myths about why the windows were flying off abounded, and he set out to debunk them, hilariously and methodically. In the process, he learned not only why the windows had failed — it had something to do with the solder used to hold the frames together — but also that everyone involved had agreed to keep the reason a secret. Between 1982 and 2005, Mr. Campbell and the photographer Peter Vanderwarker collaborated on a column called Cityscapes, for which Mr. Vanderwarker would choose an archival photo of a Boston neighborhood and then photograph the place in its present state. He would send the paired images to Mr. Campbell, who would write a short essay to accompany them. Mr. Campbell never knew what Mr. Vanderwarker might send, and Mr. Vanderwarker never knew what Mr. Campbell was going to write until he saw it in the paper. They collected their columns in a book, 'Cityscapes of Boston: An American City Through Time,' published in 1992. 'He shaped the way a whole generation of architects looked at the city,' Mr. Vanderwarker said. 'He was very much out of the Jane Jacobs mold. He loved streets. He didn't see buildings so much as objects, but as set pieces. He once described them as seniors in a class photo, all jostling each other.' Robert Douglas Campbell Jr. was born on March 31, 1937, in Buffalo. His mother, Amy (Armitage) Campbell, was a feature writer for a local newspaper before her marriage; his father was an accountant. Robert was an English major at Harvard and wrote his honors thesis on the poetry of Dylan Thomas. He went on to study journalism at Columbia University and then worked as a staff writer for Parade magazine. But what he really wanted to do was practice architecture, so he returned to Cambridge, where he attended Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He graduated in 1967. For the next six years, he worked for Sert, Jackson & Associates; he then went out on his own, working mostly as a consultant for civic projects and cultural institutions, including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. He was a founder of the Mayors' Institute on City Design, a partnership between the United States Conference of Mayors and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his son, Mr. Campbell is survived by a brother, Charles, and a sister, Anne Birkett. His marriage to Janice (Gold) Campbell, a lawyer, ended in divorce. 'I've always thought that a good model for any critic is Alice, the heroine of 'Alice in Wonderland,'' Mr. Campbell wrote in 2004 in the magazine Architectural Record. 'Alice is constantly running into creatures who are crazy — the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit — but they're crazy in a special way. They're obsessed by ideas, and they ignore real-world experience.' He added, 'Alice isn't fooled or overly impressed by her crazies, and neither should any critic be.'
Washington Post
31-03-2025
- Automotive
- Washington Post
The fastest, most-accurate fast-food drive-throughs, and more!
How much time — and gasoline — do we waste in drive-through lanes at fast-food chains? 'The number of cars in line during the peak periods seems staggering,' reader Robert Campbell writes from Cumming, Georgia, midway between Atlanta and Appalachia. Stellar question, Robert. And it's perhaps no coincidence that it comes from Chick-fil-A country. Before the pandemic, two-thirds of fast-food sales came through the drive-through window, according to Revenue Management Solutions, the food-data aficionados whose analyses help chains price their cheeseburgers. That figure soared to 83 percent as lockdowns hit, and recently has settled back down to 63 percent. As prices soar and delivery proliferates, drive-through traffic continues to fall; by January it was down more than a quarter from its pre-pandemic level. That big-picture analysis doesn't tell us much about drive-through conditions on the ground. So we turned to the fine folks at Intouch Insight, whose data allows us to dive surprisingly deep on specific restaurants. For almost a quarter century, the firm and its predecessors have dispatched secret shoppers to top fast-food outlets throughout the United States. The shopper squad visits outlets from each of 10 chains at least 160 times, focusing on the lunch and dinner hours. The shoppers collect data on just about everything, from how many cars were in line and how long they waited to place an order to the temperature of their food and whether or not the clerk said 'please' and made eye contact. For the 10 major chains in their public sample, it took 5.5 minutes for the average car to get food in 2024. That's the best drive-through performance since 2020, when the novel coronavirus pushed wary Americans mask-first into the low-contact drive-through lifestyle. (In case you're wondering, a new analysis from the same outfit found AI ordering systems sped up total waits by 11.5 seconds — though that may be due to speaker quality. AI-enabled locations tend to have better speakers, and Intouch Insight's 2024 report showed a clear, understandable speaker sped up service time by 28 seconds.) To be sure, some foods are faster than others. Taco Bell took the speed crown for the second straight year, Baja Blasting us through in just 4.3 minutes. Chick-fil-A customers waited almost twice as long — eight minutes in total. In fact, long wait times at Chick-fil-A are the only constant in a fluctuating dataset. On average since 2016, Chick-fil-A and McDonald's take the longest, while Dunkin' and KFC have the shortest waits. Much of that has to do with popularity. Chick-fil-A had an average of five vehicles waiting to holler at the speaker (or tablet-wielding employee) in a given lane at a given time over the past five years, almost double second-place McDonalds. If you adjust for the number of cars in line, Chick-fil-A moves fastest — which is perhaps not surprising given their Moneyball-like approach to chicken distribution, as chronicled in Heather Haddon's beautiful Wall Street Journal report on the chicken chain's big-league-sports-style film breakdowns. Apparently, they dispatch elite, drone-equipped analytics squads to speed up individual restaurants. The Intouch Insight shoppers also measure how much of their order each chain got right. The Georgia-based chicken slingers consistently come in near the top on that one as well, with 92 percent accuracy since 2019. Burger King and McDonalds are next, with 88 percent, while KFC has struggled at 81 percent. We couldn't find direct geographic measurements of drive-through data, despite our best efforts. But a quick analysis of Google search data for food-related drive-through terms shows Arizona must be the nation's drive-through capital. Deep in the charts of our 'where have all the programmers gone' column, our irreplaceable editor, Lori Montgomery, spotted a trend we'd overlooked: Over the past two years, network and systems administrators had been hammered just as hard as computer programmers. After decades and decades of steady employment, the once mighty sysadmin has struck out. What happened?! We didn't know, so we asked the smartest people we know — our readers. As the answers rolled in, some mentioned AI, but most focused on how a new generation of subscription software tools has made the job more efficient — and more remote. And that set the stage for outsourcing. 'The ability to perform these roles remotely sometimes causes these roles to be handed over to contractors who, being more efficient, results in fewer people in those roles,' reader and veteran IT pro Roger Blanton told us. Then we called Brian Zielinski. As you may remember, Zielinski's firm, ShapeConnect, matches companies with vendors who can help outsource or automate certain jobs. He said business grew by 50 percent last year. As a reserve officer in the Army Signal Corps, Zielinski cobbled together entire networks on the fly in Afghanistan, giving him a deep appreciation for the nuts and bolts of the sysadmin job — and a deep appreciation of how much it has changed. As cloud infrastructure reduces the need for on-site employees, he said, more companies are looking to outside IT partners. And as those outside firms get bigger and more efficient, their services are getting more attractive. Zielinski put us in touch with Enzo Scafidi, a top executive at one of those contractors, Access One Inc., in Chicago. Scafidi confirmed our suspicions. 'There is definitely a boom going on,' Scafidi said. It happened, with profoundest apologies to Ernest Hemingway, in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. First, the gradual bit. As recently as a decade ago, many system administrators had physical, hands-on jobs. They wrangled servers, ran cable and put out fires — usually, but not always, metaphorically. If they did their job well, everything ran smoothly until it didn't, making their lives look a bit like trench warfare: 'months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.' As cloud computing ate the world, though, much of system administrators' local work shifted to distant servers. Where a company once would have run all email through Microsoft Exchange Server in a rack down the hall, it now gets it from the same sort of Microsoft subscription it may use for OneDrive storage, Teams chats or Excel spreadsheets. The same cycle happened to its financial software, its customer management — almost everything. 'I've managed environments that had dozens of servers. One server per core software,' Scafidi told us. 'And now all those things are in the cloud.' The pandemic only accelerated the transition. With more remote workers, companies needed less on-site tech — and everybody got much more comfortable with online-only, remote solutions. That brings us to the sudden bit. Once a company moves a critical mass of operations to the cloud, it eventually realizes that it only needs an expert during the moments of terror. It's no longer worth paying them for all those months of boredom. So, they call someone like Scafidi. Thanks to the wonders of the internet (and a nationwide web of contractors), his firm's 'managed IT services' crew — about 80 folks, including 40 on the help desk — can juggle the moments of terror for thousands of clients. The company's large staff also means it can hire specialists for a wide range of increasingly complex services. 'The need to hire somebody on staff becomes less and less,' Scafidi told us. 'You can get away with an entry-level employee or jack-of-all trades, and outsource to a higher level … that keeps a lot of expense off the books.' And, as Rockville, Maryland, reader and longtime IT honcho Steve Beavers points out, that frees up the IT employees as well. They no longer focus on 'monotonous maintenance' that marks so much of systems administration. They might even adopt a different job description, such as data analyst or cybersecurity expert — which would of course show up as a decrease in sysadmin jobs. Why did the collapse not occur until 2022 or 2023? We're not sure. The foundation had been eroding for years. But Scafidi and Zielinski both pointed to the aftermath of the pandemic. It would have taken years for companies to shed their contracts and legacy tech. Rising interest rates, falling profits and scarily sophisticated cybersecurity threats perhaps provided the final push. Zielinski also pointed to industry consolidation. When a private equity firm or larger competitor buys you out, they'll probably swap your beloved local IT staff for a squad of national specialists. What does it mean to be good? How does it vary by region or age? Most everyone probably thinks they are a good person, but the political vitriol suggests the opposite. We are all seen as bad, or at a minimum deeply flawed, by someone. — Ruth Fundyga, in Plymouth, Massachusetts Another stellar question! Polling might provide an answer, but how would we design the question? Would we ask Americans to rank different signifiers of goodness and compare the results? We might need to subcontract this question out to the Department of Philosophy. But if you have suggestions on signifiers of goodness or any other ideas, let us know! Hi there! The Department of Data's query-a-thon continues apace! What are you curious about? Are brick-and-mortar maternity stores extinct? Who has the longest commutes? Who's most likely to have known a least one person who died by suicide? Just ask! If your question appears in a column, we'll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week, we'll mail one to Robert Campbell, one to Roger Blanton, one to Steve Beavers, one to Ruth Fundyga and a few more to the anonymous IT pros who helped us crack the case. We also owe one to Sherwood's Hyunsoo Rim, whose reporting pointed us toward drive-through data.
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Yahoo
Two Dorchester men indicted on counts of unlawful possession of firearms
A federal grand jury has presented indictments for two Dorchester men for unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition. Rickey Simmons, 46, and Robert Campbell, 35, both of Dorchester, were both indicted on Thursday night. According to charging documents presented in the court, on January 28, Simmons allegedly possessed a Tisas, Model Zig M1911, .45 caliber firearm, eight rounds of .45 caliber ammunition, and nine rounds of .22 caliber ammunition after having been convicted of a felony. Additionally, on January 28, Campbell allegedly possessed a Glock 32, .357 caliber handgun, 14 rounds of .357 caliber ammunition, 40 rounds of .45 caliber ammunition, and 75 rounds of 9mm ammunition after having been convicted of a felony. Being charged as a felon in possession can provide a sentence of up to 15 years, a 3-year supervised release, and a fine anywhere up to $250,000. This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW
