text: There was also commentary on the conflicting architectural styles, which were controversial even before the official opening. John Canaday of The New York Times wrote in 1961 that he would be surprised if the fair were not "a mess and disaster architecturally". After the fair opened, Ada Louise Huxtable of The New York Times wrote that the fair was architecturally "grotesque", while other critics lambasted the structures as befitting Coney Island or a street fair. The critic Vincent Scully Jr. derided the fair in a Life magazine article, "If This Is Architecture, God Help Us". Conversely, Time magazine wrote in June 1964 that the fair had "grace and substance" despite the presence of some "tacky" attractions, a sentiment repeated in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The American Institute of Architects gave awards to several pavilions for "excellence in design". A Newsday reporter described the fair as "both garish and subtle, tawdry and tasteful, ephemeral and lasting". After the fair closed, architectural critic Wolf Von Eckardt lambasted the fair as "a frightening image of ourselves" because of its "chaotic" architecture.
  Retrospective
  In 1967, New York Times reporter Robert Alden wrote that the 1964 fair benefited from "participation of private industry on a massive scale" but that Expo 67 had more participating countries. Another Times writer said in 1989 that "the 1964 fair was not as self-conscious a portrayal of the future so much as a display of contemporary American achievements". The same year, a Newsday reporter wrote that the 1964 fair had occurred at a time when audiences were no longer awed by cultural and technological innovations. Robert A. M. Stern wrote in 1995 that the fair had been so attractive in part because "it was out of place amid the realities of life in the nuclear age".