It's been a frustrating week and I have some thoughts about being a critic that I'd like to share. The first being: one thing that bothers me is that writers and critics (including myself) who use both anger and humor in their writing are seen as "unprofessional."

First of all, I want to assure you that I am a professional! I have a literary agent and I know the protocols for working as a full time writer. But I'm also autistic, and everyone else's unfounded expectations for how I am supposed to be and act have been a burden my entire life

Even outside of myself, architecture as a field thrives on a consensus of self-seriousness. When a good critic pokes a hole in that consensus, the result is, well, never nice. Like all critics, I learned much about being a critic from reading critics.

Great critics ARE funny. Ada Louise Huxtable compared Hudson Yards to a bunch of dildos. Charles Jencks drew Le Corbusier's Ronchamp as a tricorn hat. Reyner Banham has never been one to shy away from a wisecrack, painting scenes of European architects salivating over grain silos

As for anger, all I can say is that when I was 20, I stumbled upon Michael Sorkin's writing from when he was at the Village Voice, which proved to me that critics could and should be righteously indignant about what is an incorrigible status quo both architecturally & in general

Now that he has tragically passed away from COVID, but really from the consequences of ineptitude by city leaders, I find it more important than ever to be righteously angry about the injustice enacted through and by the built environment, even if that means making enemies.

A good critic should make a difference in their subject of criticism, but a great critic extends their criticism beyond it - and thereby must include each and every one of us in the way that they write about the world. Criticism can and should be accessible.

The recent brouhaha involving the article I published on McMansion Hell has had me wondering if writing it was the right thing to do. The answer is yes. I think it's good criticism, even if there are a couple of swear words thrown in there.

I think it's abhorrent that people are using a pandemic that has killed and made miserable hundreds of thousands of people including my role model, Michael Sorkin, for attention and profiteering. It's especially abhorrent when coming from a field that claims to better the world.