We don't much like looking at books these days (too...pagey). And we certainly don't waste our time with reviews (too...lazy). But when we see a book review with the headline "Are architects venal, vacuous and ego-driven?" even our heavy hearts light up. The Gutter, of course, knows the answer—we believe Joyce put it best on the last page of Ulysses—but we are surprised to read that Deyan Sudjic, a London-based promoter of stars, may know it too. We will naturally reserve Gutterly judgement until we can see a copy of the thing (US edition streets in November), but this, from the above-linked review, is certainly promising:

[Sudjic] has been notably sympathetic towards the institutionalised avant-garde of the architectural establishment. Which is what makes his book, The Edifice Complex, all the more astonishing. It is a work of damning apostasy. Sudjic is not merely biting the hand that fed him but mauling the entire body. His implicit lesson is: a principled architect is an architect who does loft conversions. The qualities on which a career in the big time depends include venality, opportunism, egomania, self-delusion, a vacuous manifesto, an insatiable appetite for sycophancy and a willingness to treat with tyrants. A gift for plagiarism is also useful.

Posted in Across the Pond