book 'em
I love Actar's
Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture.
It's often downright wrong (who still believes that the internet will lead to "Rurban" dwelling?). It's silly, trendy and pretentious. But on a certain level, it's absolutely destructive to silly, trendy, and pretentious architecture.
Basically, the book is a ruthlessly complete dictionary of every fetish design concept in contemporary architecture--especially as regards complexity. Every warp or weft, every appeal to skins, holes, humps, every folding surface, every bogus appeal to urbanism, every programmatic doo-dad. It's all in there. Basically, it robs the "coolness" of these ideas by exposing their total lack of novelty.
I'm going to carry this heavy-ass book with me whenever I go to places where architects congregate. That way, whenever some wonk says, "my project is about a series of sliding zones," or "we will use landscape to urbanize the site," I will say,
"Oh, that. Yeah, that radical new concept is on page 259. Of the dictionary."
* joshua, 5/03/2004 10:37:51 PM
