THE PROBLEM WITH ARCHITECTURE TODAY is genius. There’s far too much of it about. By this I mean, of course, not actual genius—as exalted by the self-aware nongenius painter, architect, courtier, and biographer Giorgio Vasari in his 1568 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. But the cosplay kind—wizened boyish otherworldliness, or dad-bod tech-bro swagger, or the old-fashioned shouty sadism masquerading as Romantic fury—with which today’s architects leverage archetypes of genius to beguile clients and bamboozle the public. It helps to be very tall. Or very short. Or to have an accent—even if only the cultivated singsong of the PhD lounge. It all puts me in mind of the “Real Men of Genius” series of television commercials for Bud Light, which was a ubiquitous feature of my adolescence. “Today we sal…
Thomas de Monchaux’s all-time favorite Yale Architecture School administrator is Deborah Berke. With whom he wrote Transform: Promising Places, Second Chances, and the Architecture of Transformational Change (Monacelli).
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