writing architecture: a practical guide by carter wiseman

I have been reading Carter Wiseman’s “Writing Architecture: A Practical Guide to Clear Communication About the Built Environment”. I don’t like it much.

It is well structured, well written and thoughtfully considered, but it is grounded in a stable definition of architecture, a practically Newtonian and clockwork conviction that the grande dame architecture is the mother of all the arts. That it is known, defined; and from this stable definition, one can merely pursue clarity to write about architecture.

Perhaps I am being unkind, but it seems to me that the cloistered Ivy League professional world assumed by Wiseman to be the ambient milieu of the practice of architecture is reflective of deeply conservative longings and deep nostalgia. It belongs not som much to another era as to a time that never existed, or exists only in retrospect.

I suppose that I am just butting up against what I don’t want to do with my book, which is sail smoothly out of a stable discipline into glass-flat waters, reassured and reassuring others that all is well. All is bloody not well. Quantum mechanics has replaced Newtonian certainty, and the profession is bloated, self-interested and ailing. In the meantime the band keeps playing on the foredeck, even as the deck pitches; there aren’t enough lifeboats and the water is icy. The profession of architecture is experiencing a Titanic rupture (or at least it needs to).

My book will be a subjective guide. It will not be a practical guide in the Wiseman sense. And yet it will be supremely practical, interlocking as it will with the uncertainty of the current moment. Stay tuned, dear reader.