ABSTRACT
As we become numbed by the onslaught of media, cultural critics are increasingly resorting to cryptic, hyped narratives, rather than the carefully crafted analysis. Criticism has become the production of sound bites that are no more than caricatures. Blogs and tweets are treated seriously. Architectural discourse has not been immune. In our need for a “quick fix” we embrace simplistic labels and extreme architecture at the expense of the full appreciation of the serious works of architecture that are occurring in the rest of the profession. Starchitects have become caricatures of themselves, caught up in their own media image. To help sort things out, critics such as Charles Jencks feel compelled to map the recent architectural discourse by applying labels to every star and their ideology. That map is also a caricature. In the popular twentieth-century media of television and “the movies,” faux architects Mike Brady of The Brady Bunch and Wilbur Post, the owner and stable mate of Mr. Ed, The Talking Horse, have been replaced by the more noble and heroic architect caricatures of the architect/electrician Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno and Wesley Snipes in Jungle Fever.
