Inga Saffron

About

Inga Saffron is the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For more than 20 years, she has been a forceful advocate for meaningful design, accessible public spaces and transit, affordable housing, historic preservation and policies that make our cities more livable and climate resilient. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the 2018 Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum and a 2012 Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In June 2020, Rutgers University Press published a selection of her Inquirer columns about Philadelphia’s urban recovery, "Becoming Philadelphia: How an old American city made itself new again." She started her career as a municipal reporter, covering local planning and zoning meetings, and went on to become a foreign correspondent, covering wars in Yugoslavia and Russia during the 1990s, and witnessing the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny. In addition to her writing about architecture and urbanism, she is an expert on the cultural history of sturgeon. Her book, "Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World’s Most Coveted Delicacy," appeared in 2003 to rave reviews. She is currently working on a history of the American newspaper building, tentatively titled "Building the News”.