Scabby Knows the Truth

Scabby the Rat is my favorite architecture critic. No, really, I’m serious. No one embodies the spirit of criticism in all its playfulness, its combativeness, its under-sung and decidedly on-the-ground quality. One often forgets that protest is also criticism, perhaps the purest form of criticism there is. When I’m holed up in my office typing up my salvos, Scabby the Rat is there on the street, doing the work of drawing attention to architecture’s basest and most insidious injustices, those that intersect with labor, with exploitation, with the fact that architecture doesn’t just happen on Instagram and in design schools but in the real world.

Scabby’s a pure Chicagoan (whereas I am an adoptive one), having been “invented” by Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers over three decades ago. His ebullient, revolting visage has graced sidewalks ever since, and will continue to do so, having recently survived yet another legal challenge culminating in a July decision by the National Labor Relations Board that determined that free speech equally appli…