Criticism

I've been reading architecture and it's not easy, especially if the book happens to come out of the early eighties when all architectural writers seemed to have gone on some course to make themselves incomprehensible. That there is so much bad writing on architecture (I mean 'classicist stereometry' is not a good term, you can't even say it, it hardly rolls off the tongue, and you end up wondering whether the conjugation is the right way round)- that it uses too many words and has no way of seemingly putting them together effectively, must be some kind of highly paradoxical structural defect. Where is, for instance, our TJ Clark of criticism- an art critic who can actually, at some length, write an enjoyable piece on why a Da Vinci in the Louvre is better than the one in the National without using a single funny word and still be highly entertaining?

Perhaps, if we are daft enough to be so pretentious and ineffective at the same time, we should adopt the language of Masterchef. We could pant:

'Jamie has made an idiot of Le Corbusier followed by a comfit of Zaha on an unsteady base with a ramoulade of bad sociology topped with a finial of fine augustation...his first pudding is a mess of Labrouste with sweet marble sauce'.....PANT....

'Angeline has done a balls up of Fun Palace with La Villette pieces in custard. She's following with upside down Alberti cake, dressed with a swift Thai nonchalance and a Dubai dip.....PANT..

'Tricycle is plotting a teasmade of monstrosity with a snide of disaster relief, to be followed by a quantum erratum of meringue infidel with aspects of prune.....AND...

'Reggie is making an all round hash of it and has run out of time'. As is the way.