Christopher Hawthorne

surprising career change. Last year, after nearly 14 years as the architecture critic at the , he took a job under Mayor Eric Garcetti as the city’s first chief design officer. Hawthorne had been one of the few architecture critics left at a major U.S. daily and gave a civic-minded rationale for his departure. “I stubbornly continue to believe in the public realm,” he wrote in the . “A career spent writing about architecture and urbanism, while it’s certainly made me cynical in some ways, has