Why Are Men Who Build Skyscrapers Afraid of This Woman?

SURROUNDED BY STEEL AND GLASS, she stands in the lobby of the Comcast Center, gazing up and around, doing the mental calculus that comes naturally after eight years in this job. Inga Saffron takes a long look at Humanity in Motion, the installation by sculptor Jonathan Borofsky that fills this cavernous entryway. It begins on the ground, with life-size statues of a black man and a child, both looking up above, where men and women carved of fiberglass walk along beams that crisscross in all directions. “I rather like the idea of all these people on these different trajectories that never intersect,” Saffron says. “It’s like a metaphor for humanity. The sculpture reflects the crossroads quality of what this could be. You can imagine the crowd of people completing this artwork.”

Borofsky’s creation was the subject of her column last November, so it’s driving Saffron absolutely crazy that she needs to wait until May — May! — to pour her thoughts on everything surrounding it into newsprint. Comcast’s gleaming tower is easily the most significant building in Philadelphia since Liberty Place first looked down on Billy Penn 21 years ago. Considering the economic impact of keeping the cable giant anchored here, it’s the city’s most critical development in a century. Its doors are open, but the plaza at its feet isn’t finished, so Saffron, the Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic and arguably the paper’s most feared columnist, has postponed her final judgment until the May completion. Somewhere high above, Brian Roberts holds his breath as Saffron speaks. “The plaza, the concourse, the public components to it,” she says. “That will make or break the building.”

Saffron isn’t just a critic — she’s a reporter and, often, an advocate in her weekly “Changing Skyline” column. Those roles muddy the journalistic waters at times, but in a city with a planning agency that’s asleep at the wheel and a tangled, ineffective zoning code, her words carry great weight. She not only applauds forward-thinking projects, like an aggressive remodeling of the Kimmel Center to draw more traffic, but pursues a vision of what Philadelphia could become. When Saffron wrote a five-part series on development along the Delaware River, she didn’t simply check off all the obvious blunders and squandered opportunities there — she saw lessons in how Louisville and North Jersey transformed their waterfronts, and took aim at a seemingly immovable object, Interstate 95, calling it a noose around the neck of Penn’s Landing. It’s not just architecture and aesthetics she’s writing about, but how the “built world,” as she calls it, affects us all in very real ways. Absent are the haughty academic pretensions some critics rely on. She knows those wouldn’t play here; they don’t for her, either. Instead, it’s her passion for cities — for this city — that drives her, making what could be a dull subject seem vital, demanding higher standards, and sending a message to every developer whose vision ends at the bottom line and every architect who plays it safe: Build at your own peril.