The design industry deserves better criticism.
I’m accustomed to criticism. I frequently publish opinion pieces, often about provocative subjects, so I’m just asking for it. “You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something,” H.L. Mencken supposedly said.
In 2008, for example, I suggested that automation eventually could create better buildings than architects do, and when I revisited this topic in 2015, urban planner Jeff Speck called it “tech fetishism.” I don’t mind this at all, because it prompts an important dialogue about the relationships between designers, their tools, and their values. Besides, as Samuel Johnson put it, “I would rather be attacked than unnoticed.”
What I do mind, however, is the occasional attack from people with ulterior motives who intentionally distort my meaning. In 2013, after learning that the U.S. has an over-abundance of housing (13 million empty units and a gross vacancy rate of 14% in 2012), I offered a “modest proposal” outlining the benefits of a brief moratorium on most new construction in order to redirect investment in adaptive reuse, historic preservation, and net-zero building. A rightwing blogger used this as an excuse to decry “left-wing proposals to stop climate change” as “ridiculous and extreme”: “Hosey is clearly willing to jeopardize our economy for his environmental agenda.” (The reader comments are particularly entertaining.) Reportedly I contradicted myself by calling my own proposal both “modest” and “radical.” But that critic may have skipped junior-high lit classes, since he isn’t familiar with the phrase “modest proposal,” coined after Jonathan Swift’s famous satirical essay and now a reference to any ironically extreme suggestion meant to call attention to a problem. I fear for the state of American education.
The latest such attack is from someone named Graham McKay, a self-described “independent architecture writer, critic, blogger, lecturer” who teaches in the engineering department at the University of Sharjah. McKay recently read (or skimmed) my 2012 book, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design, and found it wanting. Fair enough. But his critique, published on his own blog, is occasionally incomprehensible and generally downright bizarre. For example, he has a habit of projecting onto me desires and intentions I don’t have. “He doesn’t want us to love anything for reasons that aren’t visual,” he declares of me, before acknowledging that there’s an entire chapter on designing for the non-visual senses. He weirdly misinterprets the book’s epigraph from Oscar Wilde and contends that I was disingenuous in using it. (I wasn’t.) Errors in both information and typography are the first indicators of carelessness. He gets most of my bio wrong, a mistake easily avoided with a quick Google search, and he makes an unexplained crack about the American Institute of Architects, for which I serve as a volunteer.
At one point, McKay actually calls my book “evil.” In a passage of the book in which I advocate for designers to become more knowledgeable about environmental psychology and other emerging research, I write, “To captivate consumers longer, designers will need a better understanding of what stimulates emotional longevity” (p107). Creating things to be loved longer can mitigate obsolescence and waste, which strikes me as a wholly uncontroversial aim. Yet, McKay insists that my intent is Satanic: “This sinister sentence is evil encapsulated.” As near as I can figure, I’m demonic because I’m supposedly “a commercial man at heart” with “a commercial justitification [sic] for a [sic] sustainability.” As I describe at length in the book, the core definition of sustainability is the integration of environmental, social, and, yes, economic value—the “triple bottom line.” If that’s “evil encapsulated,” take it up with Dana Meadows, Gro Harlem Brundtland, John Elkington, or any of sustainability’s other original thought leaders, living and dead.
McKay sizes me up: “He’s pro-innovation, pro-consumption.” Is anyone anti-innovation? As for consumption, yes, I’m all for it, in the sense that if you don’t eat, you die. However, nothing in my book suggests that I’m pro-waste or pro-over-consumption. And if McKay is so anti-consumption, why does he choose to live in the UAE, where energy consumption per capita is among the highest in the world?
His beef with my book boils down to this: “If beauty and sustainability aren’t so incompatible, then why identify some buildings as environmentally virtuous but ugly…?” He continues: “Hosey wants beautiful things to be seen as virtuous rather than the other way around.” And: “Hosey is attempting to keep beauty and virtue firmly separate.” No. Virtue and beauty are not the same thing, but they can overlap. (“Beauty is the virtue of the body,” wrote Emerson, “as virtue is the beauty of the soul.”) The first few pages of the book explain that many of the most celebrated designers dismiss sustainability altogether because they misunderstand it as a purely ethical agenda and not an aesthetic one. Peter Eisenman: “‘Green’ and sustainability have nothing to do with architecture.” The whole point of the book is to bridge the divide between standards of “good design” and “green design.” Is this not roughly the same thing as connecting beauty and virtue in architecture?
Elsewhere, McKay has written, “Our narrow concept of Beauty has forgotten Virtue ever existed.” That “narrow concept,” he insists, is the “very strong correlation between architectural beauty and the wealth and power of those that fund it.” (Nevermind that he praises “energy-efficient palaces” in his own writing but denigrates energy-efficient office buildings in mine.) He urges architects to rediscover forgotten traditions of building: “Some yet-to-be-written history of virtue in architecture will document how fewer and less expensive materials were made to achieve the same ends.” Open my book, pick any 10-page passage at random, and you’re likely to find me praising the use of “fewer and less expensive materials.” You’ll find me marveling at the incredible ingenuity of the Inuit igloo, the Anasazi cliff dwelling, and the Icelandic turf farm. You’ll find me gushing about “the intimate commingling of people and place,” a condition I call natural culture, in communities such as the North American Apache, the Gikwe Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Surma and Mursi peoples of Africa’s Omo Valley, and Australian Aboriginals: “We Americans may think we need more and more…, but for fifty thousand years, the indigenous communities of Australia have thrived primarily with three simple tools—the spear, the digging stick, and the boomerang” (p108). (This appears on the very next page after the sentence McKay calls “evil encapsulated.”) The end of the last full chapter is devoted entirely to what we can learn from favelas, the world’s fastest-growing human habitats, which I dub “cities of tomorrow.” They are profoundly poor in resources and profoundly rich in spirit.
But I’m “a commercial man at heart.”
McKay confesses to “skipping a bit” of my book, but either he skipped most of it, or he himself is being disingenuous. If you want to debate about whether “Virtue” and “Beauty” are synonymous, let’s have that debate (although capitalizing those words smacks of dilettantism in a way that decidedly undermines his critique of privilege). Otherwise, I don’t see how my book could instigate such frothing at the mouth.
In the foreword to his novel The Defense (1930), Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers,” then proceeded to explain passages that don’t actually occur in the novel, false leads meant to see if his critics had actually read the book. I’m Nabokov in reverse: I’d much rather that hack reviewers spare my time—and, more importantly, that of their readers. Designers and the general public both deserve better guidance.