Designing Cities | Inga Saffron

Inga Saffron has been the Philadelphia Inquirer’s architecture critic since 1999. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In June 2020, Rutgers University Press published a selection of her columns, "Becoming Philadelphia: How an old American city made itself new again." She is also the author of a cultural history of the sturgeon, "Caviar: The Strange and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy." Before becoming the Inquirer’s architecture critic, she worked as a foreign correspondent for the Inquirer in Russia and the former Yugoslavia, where she covered the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, and witnessed the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny. Bon asks Inga about her journey in becoming an architecture critic, transforming public spaces through design and why diseases are the most powerful architects.