There’s a book – The Humument – by artist Tom Philips. What Philips did was take a book, The Human Monument (W H Mallock, 1892) and artistically deface it to make a new story with a new plot and new characters. More or less. It doesn’t matter. Each page is a joy.

I’m going to give The Humument treatment to Michael Sorkin’s article Critical Measure: Why Criticism Matters from the June 2014 issue of The Architectural Review. Here’s the full article. Like A Human Monument, it suffers from being a bit long, a bit longwinded, skewed by the author’s preoccupations and prejudices and – most damningly – having no illustrations.  

To me, the point of the article seems to be to position Mr. Sorkin as conscience consultant to the architectural profession. It had to happen I guess as part of the ongoing outsourcing of architectural skills, but what’ll become of those who can’t afford this service? More to the point, what’ll become of us because of those who can’t afford this service?! Will we be condemned to suffer shapes that haven’t passed Sorkin’s critical digestion? Will we even notice?

Another comical theme is to reprimand Zaha Hadid Architects for not setting a better example regarding sustainability.

I’ve neither the humour nor Philips’ talent so what I’m going to do is just delete the bulk of the text and keep only what amuses me or otherwise suits my purposes.

DISCLAIMERS: For all you Post-Modernists out there, I must state that Mr. Sorkin did not embed any specific text for me to discover. He did though embed meanings but for the most part they eluded me and I’m not sure whose fault that was. But for all you Deconstructivists out there, I should mention that my generated text was never a subtext of any kind. It follows its own path at times contradictory and at times parallel. And finally, if there’s anyone who actually bought into the recent attempt to resuscitate AdHoc-ism, a dictionary does not say all there is to say. Are we good to go?

• • •

I began this exercise intending to ridicule excruciating paragraphs such as this next. Make of it what you will. It doesn’t seem a great way to argue for why criticism matters. Oh to be paid by the word!

In the course of writing this post, I read between and across the lines and paragraphs in more than one direction. I saw and tested many juxtapositions of words and meanings. Some I played for cheap laughs and some I twisted to my own agenda. Some paragraphs I inadvertently paraphrased. The original meanings did not go unnoticed. I agreed three times at least with Sorkin and this I did not expect.

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