Architecture Depends: Reviews

POSITIVE

Flora Samuel reviewing it for the Times Higher as its Book of the Week.

Robert Mull reviewing it in the Architects Journal.

Tim Abrahams in Blueprint.

Randy Deutsch on his website.

Lucas Freeman in the very wonderful (and I am not just saying that to repay) Toronto based journal, Scapegoat.

Ann Thorpe’s long and thoughtful comparison with Tim Brown’s Change By Design on her Design Activism website.

The book’s endorsers - but I guess it is their role to be positive.

The judges of the 2009 RIBA Presidents Award for Research.

POSITIVE WITH RESERVATIONS

Charles Holland in Icon, repeated on his excellent blog. He notes that I attack straw men. Guilty as charged.

Steve Parnell on his now sadly defunct blog. Probably the most thorough review there is.

Andrew Leach, the Tafuri scholar, in Radical Philosophy. He thought it would have been better at half its length. I tend to agree, but at time of writing was suffering typical academic angst of being caught out, and so covered my back with more words and references.

James Brown on his blog, with a preliminary reading that is then expanded in a review in Building Design.

MAINLY NEGATIVE

Julia Galef in Metropolis. Apparently finds the writing obtuse. 

PURE BILE

Richard Weston  in Building Design. Well, I don’t like his scarves either, so there. My hunch is that he saw the very first footnote which gently prods at the sanctity of his beloved Utzon, and then read the rest of the book through a veil of tears of fury. But the sneering personal jibes ("...to a list of acknowledgments that reads like a who's who of the metropolitan elite in which he moves...") suggest otherwise. For the record, the vast majority people I acknowledge are either dead, live in Sheffield, or are family.