Literary Dose #9

"One can paint a very silly picture of the architectural journalism, not just anyone of its practitioners, but of almost anyone of them. He or she is the second degree of the reactive mindlessness. Where the architect had to wait until he has been asked to do something for a client, the critic has to wait until the architect has done something in reaction to that client. At the end of the communication chain there is a reader who, at best, will react to this reaction. Here we have a carousel of emptiness. No wonder architectural journalism belongs to the least respected forms of cultural mediation. It is very instructive to compare this role play with the practice of embedded journalism as we know it since the Iraq War in 2003. Highly graphical pictures were brought to us right from the battle field. But these pictures were screened. They never really showed the grim side of the story. They were reminding more of a war film, than of capturing the reality of that war. Getting glitzy pictures and paying the prize of becoming a puppet of prefabricated reality. Very much visibility, very little understanding. The embeddee infiltrates his subject, but the subject very much infiltrates the embeddee to secure "operational security." It is hardly exaggerated to take this description of embedded journalism as being particularly apt to the practice of architectural journalism today. The most respected magazines and most authoritarian critics are often acting as shameless ghost writers, dividing their time between laudations and boring introductions to architect's monographs. Moreover, more often than not they base whole careers on the ones of design celebrities, rather than searching the world for architectural themes bigger than architecture. Is there any escape from this deliberate slavery? Perhaps it can be found in the very embeddedness of architecture itself."

- Ole Bouman, from "A New Brief for Architecture," in Organizing for Change (2007), edited by Michael Shamiyeh & DOM Research Laboratory.