Indulgence needed.

SPACE REPLACES US: ESSAYS AND PROJECTS ON THE CITY

By Michael Bell, with postscripts by Sanford Kwinter and Steven Holl. New York The Monacelli Press. 2004. [pounds sterling]27.50

There was a time when I read books such as this with a bemused indulgence: what does it essentially matter if we see another confused, pretentious, maladroit piece of self-indulgent self-promotion by an architect who can design but not write? After all, it's a big world out there and there is never enough variety on the architecture shelves of the bookshops. In this case, the perpetrator is Michael Bell from Columbia University, and he puts on the full show: overblown English full of redundant words; silly phrases ('architectural durations'; 'Having Heard Mathematics: The Topologies of Boxing'; 'immobile cyclones'; and so on); nasty graphics, in this case, computerized; and references to critics talking about critics talking about critics ('Ad Reinhardt, says Robert Smithson, is obsessed by what George Kubler called "the space between events'").

Maybe this man has some talent; maybe he hasn't: there is nothing in this hideous text or these often blurry images to prove it either way. It's possible of course that for some American academics this laboured, almost unreadable style of writing is intended as an art form in its own right; it's also possible that in any case American academic writing is now so different in style and terminology that it is no longer fair to review it is as if it were the same language spoken every day by the British. A more generous spirit than I might perhaps find something here. But in the current period, in which we have seen the debacle of the Cambridge architecture school (AR December 2004), one thing is certain: if you devote your life to teaching architecture, to designing and constructing, to exploring the beauties and curiosities of the built landscape, to waking up early each day to the challenges and skills of the building site, to telling the story of it all to the young, the ambitious, the hopeful and the confused, then your job will be considered worthless by our universities; but if you write an overpriced, obscure and useless book which almost nobody will read, get it a few puffs from a couple of tame professors and have it paraded about in a journal or two, you will be able to fill out all the necessary forms from the Research Assessment Exercise; and you will be welcomed with open arms into the rotting academic heartland of Britain.