An hilarious essay on “How to speak like an architect” by Ike Ijeh and Lee Monks in bdonline. They take actual descriptions of projects by starchitects like Daniel Liebeskind, Bjarke Ingels and Jean Nouvel, translate and rate them. They are so cruel.
For example, this one by Zaha Hadid:
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Dive into the quasi-urban fields
Zaha Hadid on MAXXI, Rome, 2010
“Our proposal offers a quasi-urban field, a ‘world’ to dive into rather than a building as signature object. The campus is organised and navigated on the basis of directional drifts and distribution of densities rather than key points. This is indicative of the character of the MAXXI as a whole: porous, immersive, a field space. An inferred mass is subverted by vectors of circulation. The external as well as internal circulation follows the overall drift of the geometry. Vertical and oblique circulation elements are located at areas of confluence, interference and turbulence.”
Plain English translation by Lee Monks: We are a pretty ordinary big building so I’ve got to talk us up a bit, bear with me. You can move inside it, and outside it. It’s a building. It’s big. There are holes in it, and it’s easy to get lost. It’s roomy. Like the inside of my head.
Ike Ijeh translation: Hadid straddles the divide between intellectualism and commercial success. Nonetheless, she still has form for pretentious indulgences, as this description of the MAXXI shows. Chinks of legibility manage to shine through: basically, the MAXXI is about lots of fluid-like forms, with lifts or stairs placed where the forms meet. Why didn’t the passage just say this? Therein lies the riddle of architectural texts.
Unintelligibility rating: 3/5
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