Mark, I fear you’ve been so consumed with taking my review of your book personally—and reacting in kind—that you’ve neglected to respond to its substance. Re the “snobbery.” Even lacking in the credentials that would, in your mind, authorize me to say anything about the culture of the US, I am familiar with its predilection for puns and that these are humorously intended (by NYRA’s editors, by the way). Maybe there’s some confusion on your part about what “snobbery” even is, though, since you count referring to one’s achievements in a publicly available CV as such.
Just because some terms, like “Critical Project,” appear in the title of a book, doesn’t mean that they are in standard usage, let alone that there was ever a consciously contrived plot to deprive the world of aesthetics that your use and capitalization of the phrase suggests.
I’m not trying to explain anything to you about the Midwest or claim that my knowledge is superior to yours. The review isn’t addressed to you personally, and nor, of course, do I know anything about the circumstances of your upbringing. Still, it’s strange to think that one must be biographically endowed with credentials such as castrating pigs or cutting down sunflowers to speak on settler colonialism or prairie ecologies. By the way, sunflowers are native to Nebraska. You and your soybeans, ecologically speaking, are the invaders.
I’m not sure how I would know about your office block and strip mall renovations in Omaha. You feature over a hundred projects by your firm on your website, but not these two. I can’t see that you feature anything at all from the Midwest, for that matter. Your online portfolio mostly features high-end, luxury projects for clients in New York, California, and the Gulf region. I don’t care where you make your money, but it seems fair to state that these are the places you’re overwhelmingly invested in and want to advertise as such.
I challenged your assertion that modernist architecture, including that of Le Corbusier, was opposed to aesthetics. It’s a plainly spurious claim. Since you don’t, or can’t, respond, my point stands. The same applies to the equally daft assertions that critical theorists were opposed to aesthetics and that aesthetics are never taught in schools of architecture.
What your letter most confirms, though, is your inability to think with any subtlety, or even to grasp such nuance in the work of others. You seem to think that I too must hate aesthetics and want to banish them from the world because I value the capacity for critical thought. Even were I not also a published photographer and exhibited artist this would be a crass position to hold. It perhaps bears repeating that your take on aesthetics and critique presents us, in your book and your response to my review, only “with false choices between speciously opposed terms: reasoning and feeling, criticism and enjoyment, politics and beauty.”