It's hard to fault the logic in this Reader's note, just in, but we think we'll keep the disses coming on this front. With your help. It is, after all, a fight for the soul of the profession.

That's right: busting the earnestness. Own it.

Dear Gutterfolks

I'm enjoying your JargonWatch entries (somewhat reminiscent of Private Eye's Pseuds Corner, which has been running now for, oh about a kazillion years). But isn't taking architects to task for pretension and intellectual obfuscation a bit like criticizing basketball players for acting like they're so damn tall?

I propose a new column, MammonWatch, where the boosterish, happy-clappy and self-serving prose of developers and their cohorts (architects, right?) is used to disguise the genuinely harmful and disruptive effects of greed-drive (not to mention hideous) projects all over what used to be called the 'Third World' i.e. the 'new global marketplace.

Or how about AtmosphereWatch, a column dedicated to collecting all the asinine and facile musings of all the surface-jockeys and Maya-monkeys who seem to invoke that essentially meaningless word as post-hoc justification for their (ironically) self-similar exercises in geometry manipulation and control-point tweaking that operate in that uneasy border-zone between not-very-good-architecture and downright-crappy-sculpture. (this could run in conjunction with CalculusWatch, where, apparently, the mere mention of this (not particularly) higher Math serves to make the architect look so damn smart (or so they think). That one wouldn't run very long though, as I can only think of one dude who (repeatedly) does it.

And yes, that's right: I go to UCLA!

Best,

A Friend

Posted in JargonWatch