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Why some architects fail to realize their ideal buildings, and what
architecture critics can learn from novelists. The usual history of
architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic
makers. But it is also a false narrative in many ways, rarely
acknowledging the personal failures and disappointments of
architects. In Bleak Houses, Timothy Brittain-Catlin investigates
the underside of architecture, the stories of losers and
unfulfillment often ignored by an architectural criticism that
values novelty, fame, and virility over fallibility and rejection.
As architectural criticism promotes increasingly narrow values,
dismissing certain styles wholesale and subjecting buildings to a
Victorian litmus test of "real" versus "fake," Brittain-Catlin
explains the effect this superficial criticality has had not only
on architectural discourse but on the quality of buildings. The
fact that most buildings receive no critical scrutiny at all has
resulted in vast stretches of ugly modern housing and a pervasive
public illiteracy about architecture.
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