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About

Critique This is about. . .

It is tough for anyone to define a thing, it is generally much easier to describe how you feel about said thing, rather than creating a line of logic describing what it is you are trying to define.  Often people associate architects with drawing or performing structural calculations, but the one skill that defines what an architect is, is the critique. The ability to effectively critique our environment and just about any other object is what gives us our competitive edge. It seems that the critique is slowly fading away. Unfortunately we are no longer concerned with creating buildings that have spirit, instead we want to know what the latest architectural styles and fashions are. The critique is losing the war and the profession of architecture is rapidly losing credibility and talent to other fields due to our recent fascination with everything new.

This fashionable fascination with the architectural avant garde is most evident in the content of the popular architectural publications circulated in the United States.  Often I feel as if I am reading Playboy when looking through a new issue of Architectural Record.  Yes the pictures are nice, but where is the content?  Where is the critical analysis of the architecture?  However, this is not the fault of Architectural Record.  It is not their purpose or the objective of the other major architectural magazines in the United States.  I had the privilege of meeting Robert Ivy (the editor of Architectural Record) and it was during dinner that he spoke about Architectural Record being the record of the state of architecture in the world.  Their objective is simple:  document, record and report.  Again, there is nothing wrong with that.

Then there are the blogs which for the most part are less critical than the Record.  If the Record is Playboy then the blogs are nothing more than visual buffets of sexy renderings.  Most of the popular blogs do not even produce their own content, they simply publish the work of others, good or bad, and usually unbuilt.  These blogs are only concerned with quantity of content, not quality.  One of my favorite blogs used to be DeZeen, which at one time I thought would be able to sustain itself and do what others could not, but it appears even they are starting to drink the Kool-Aid.  I studied all of the architectural blogs on the internet that I read on a daily basis, and when writing this article I studied how other blogs described their sites.  The number one promise that was made on nearly every blog was that they promised to supply content, nothing about quality or what their mission was.  So after reading the description of the DeZeen site I was not suprised to read that their promise was to feed you content before anyone else could, and were so bold as to post the following quote “. . .  (DeZeen) has grown rapidly to become one of the most popular and influential architecture and design blogs on the internet.”  If popularity is what you crave, fine, but how are they influential?

Critique This at the most general level is simply about architecture, but more importantly it is about change.  Our mission is to change how the architectural community discusses and views architecture.  It was this apparent lack of criticalness within the profession that prompted the creation of this site.  After a couple of drinks we joked about naming the site U.S. Architecture Sux, why not?  We thought about it some more and thought that rather succomb to being another hater we would seek to change the game.  U.S. architecture doesn’t suck, but there are a lot of things that are broken in the profession.  Our promise is not that if you vote for us, we’ll make all of your wildest dreams come true, but our promise is to discuss serious issues within and outside of the architectural profession.  Our mission is outlined in the Critique This U.S. Constitution which is a document that we have drafted to explicitly state our core values for you the reader and ourselves so that we never lose our way.  Feel free to Critique This below.

Best regards,

James Cornetet