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I said what I said (Patreon)

Published:
2023-04-07 18:02:09
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Also this is my last column for the nation! mcmansion hell returns to its regular schedule next week! thank you all for reading. 

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Stop Gatekeeping Architecture

A long time ago, way before I became an architecture critic, I was a person who looked at buildings. It never occurred to me that this was something one could do for a living.

Comments

Kevin Mercado

Your entire series of articles for The Nation is wonderful. I've always loved architecture and your writing does such a good job of making things understandable and entertaining. I'm so happy I discovered you so many years ago on Tumblr. I've shared your articles with pretty much all of my friends and family over the years.

Harry Teasley

OK, here's a little counterpoint to the accusations of gatekeeping... for most of my career, I've been a game developer, and the amount of criticism and disdain our teams would get for everything was unreal. Everyone thinks they're the best game designer ever, the best architect, the best art director... there's a lot of criticism that lacks a lot of understanding of the factors involved, and that leads to experts just not wanting to hear it. It's frustrating when the hoi polloi (he said facetiously) attributes to incompetence things that are outside the control of the designers, and it gets ugly quickly. Whether it's technological limitations, financial limitations, building code limitations, whatever, I've found that, as often as not, a confusing or apparently stupid decision has a set of circumstances behind it where capable people were forced to do what they could with the situation at hand. That's where you get gatekeeping. That's where you get experts protective of their domains: they are the ones that have to consider everything, and care about degenerate cases, and answer to a stadium full of people with all kinds of desires and tastes and veto power, while people/users/players/critics only have to think about their own emotions. Just saying. Gatekeepers can use some empathy and understanding, too.