Magazine Architecture She calls her peers “magazine architects.” By which she meant image-driven and fad-driven architects, because architecture magazines probe no deeper than the look and style of the buildings they cover.

They never interview clients or users. They never criticize buildings except, rarely, in terms of being bad art or off-trend. Articles consist primarily of stylized color photographs. Reports cover only new or newly renovated buildings, often in language that sounds like the “prismatic luminescence” school of wine writing. The subject is taste, not use; commercial success, not operational success.

A range of observers of architecture are now suggesting that the field may be bankrupt, the profession itself impotent, and the methods inapplicable to contemporary design tasks. It is further suggested that collectively they are incapable of producing pleasant, livable, and humane environments, except perhaps occasionally and then only by chance.

“The curse of architectural photography, which is all about the wonderfully composed shot, the absolutely lifeless picture that takes time out of architecture—the photograph taken the day before move-in. That’s what you get awards for, that’s what you make a career based on. All those lovely but empty stills of uninhabited and uninhabitable spaces have squeezed more life out of architecture than perhaps any other single factor.”