The New York Times has a highly favorable architecture review of the two-year, $205 million renovation of the Ford Foundation's Manhattan headquarters, an update that apparently includes the conversion of the former president's suite into new conference rooms named after Wilma Mankiller and Fannie Lou Hamer.
It's a lengthy review that manages nonetheless to avoid entirely any discussion of either how the foundation escaped the control of the Ford family whose fortune funded it or of whether, fancy offices aside, the foundation has much to show for itself in terms of progress for the disadvantaged groups it's trying to help. Maybe instead of fancy conference rooms in Manhattan the Ford Foundation should be based in Mississippi, or on an Indian reservation. Maybe they should have assigned the architecture review to William Easterly. I'm kidding about Easterly, but I'm serious about the idea of the architecture review doing a better job of considering not only the building the foundation is in, but the way it matches or fails to match the mission at hand. What if the Foundation, instead of renovating the building, sold it and gave the the proceeds and the money it would have spent on the renovation to actual poor people in Mississippi and on Indian reservations? Maybe that wouldn't work, but it's not a crazy question to at least raise in the review of a fancy headquarters of a charity.