"What to do when the fizzy world of high-style design starts to seem too, too much?" asks Nancy Levinson in the first lines of an uncharacteristically frothy Pixel Points review of John Thackara's In The Bubble: Designing in a Complex World? "When you've grown weary of the exclamatory chatter of the shelter rags, when you've flipped idly through one too many multi-pound monographs, when you've become surfeited with the ever-expanding universe of luxe stuff and cool things?" Sez Nancy: read The Gutter! Then she goes on to make the book look irresistible:

Thackara visits the Prada "epicenter" in Tokyo and is told by one of the designer's flacks that "shopping is the fundamental purpose of cities today." But the Herzog and de Meuron-designed boutique impresses him less for the sleek architecture than for the spectacle of haute couture hubris. "For me," he writes, "the Prada project smelled like the last days of Rome."

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