Guest Commentary: Edwin Slipek to be honored next month with Branch Medallion

Edwin Slipek

If we are shaped by our environments, Edwin Slipek Jr.’s love of architecture was likely sparked at birth.

He entered the world at what is now MCV West Hospital, an iconic expression of Art Deco. The distinctive architecture of Richmond’s Ginter Park, where he grew up, fueled his passion for design. Over the years, the height and history of buildings, their aesthetic and expressive appeal sharpened his visual awareness. He built a career writing, teaching, touring and curating exhibits about architecture.

For his extraordinary patronage of design in Virginia, Mr. Slipek will be honored Nov. 9 with the Branch Medallion by the Branch Museum of Architecture and Design.

An architectural masterwork designed in 1919 by John Russell Pope, the Branch Museum explores the impact of design on everyday life. Through thought-provoking exhibitions, it aims to spark creativity, joy and appreciation for design excellence. The idea is to empower people to recognize and promote better design for better lives. Thank you, Mr. Slipek, for doing that so well for so long.

Subconsciously most of us know when something is well designed. It works or it doesn’t. It attracts or annoys. It is comfortable or alienating, memorable or forgettable. But good architecture critics, such as Mr. Slipek, help us understand why. By deepening our understanding of design, they elevate our appreciation and insistence on the best.

In the 1970s, Mr. Slipek started writing about art and architecture for the alternative weekly newspaper, Richmond Mercury, where he interviewed such luminaries as Philip Johnson.

Art collectors and entrepreneurs Sydney and Frances Lewis hired Mr. Slipek as director of corporate communications at Best Products, where he created an annual report so creative that The Wall Street Journal took note.

He collaborated with such architectural greats as SITE Inc., Philip Johnson and Robert Venturi. In this period, he also founded and published Clue magazine, an avant-garde tableau of Richmond’s art and culture scene.

The Branch Museum of Architecture and Design on Monument Avenue.

Over the next few decades, he curated exhibitions illuminating overlooked aspects of Richmond architecture. A show about the small but estimable collection of Art Deco buildings downtown, for instance, showed that while Art Deco represents modernism, its roots rest in tradition and historical association.

In another exhibit, Mr. Slipek introduced most of us to Ralph Adams Cram, who transformed 300 acres of raw land in the West End with a Gothic vision he believed could ennoble the University of Richmond campus, its students and, by extension, future generations.

And while exploring the suburbanization of rural Glen Allen 23 years ago, he made a plea for a humanist approach to development still evident in his current Richmond BizSense commentaries: “We care about the many places where we once lived, visited, attended school or vacationed. They all hold deep associations for us. Certain places have a sense of, well, place.”

Whether critiquing new government buildings, urban green space or riverfront development, Mr. Slipek’s analysis aligns good design with that sense of place. He makes us think about the connections that form a project: What are the layers of history, the current conditions, what happened and can happen here?

From 1992-2021 Mr. Slipek was the senior contributing editor and the only architecture critic in the state of Virginia at Style Weekly. While there, he composed anthems to Richmond’s unsung historic buildings. How do you keep the city’s character intact without the buildings that form its identity, he asked. In moving obituaries to demolished buildings in Oregon Hill, he warned that a proud old neighborhood might lose its sense of self. Good development, he argued, should respect an area’s deep historic layering, tighten up basic infrastructure and let market forces move in an organic way.

For 16 years Mr. Slipek taught world art history and architecture at Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School. He continues to educate as an adjunct instructor in architectural history at the VCU School of the Arts, and as a contributor to ArchitectureRichmond, an online encyclopedia and forum dedicated to regional architecture and design, which he co-founded.

The architecture of Mr. Slipek’s career is not unlike the landmark in which he was born: substantial, meaningful and worthy of honor.