The Tail End of Reviews

 
Seldom is it that you find the most scintillating articles at the back of glossy magazines. In fact, never. What do you find there instead? How do you end the magazine? Usually with classified advertising or the continuations of the longer, more serious articles that no one ever reads. Waste, that is the paradigm of our age. Information given but not taken but something has to fill out the pages to a soft landing on the last page after all the hints and heavy advice in the leading pages about how to be perfect at everything by a judiciously applied scientific method. The next article is usually dedicated to a celebrity delving into the personality as though the presence on the screen justifies being also a social model. You need to Know. You need to Follow. The tail end of this review are links to articles in other selected reviews, not with any altruistic sense but as a convenient way of concluding.

Interior design magazines have incredible photographs, taken by experts in lighting magic. They have the desired effect of transporting the mind into the dream state where desires are born. F. Scott Fitzgerald operates in that zone with his novels and surely Hemingway is mystified all his life why his own novels, compared to that of friend F. Scott, feels so superbly sparse.

Being asserted elsewhere, it is reiterated that modern architecture only looks good in photographs and for the outside of the building, the emphasis is not the lighting but the camera angles and juxtapositions of sheets in planar relationships in natural light. Photographs are no longer taken when the same subject is covered in layers of soot and dust accumulated in a relatively short period in the life of a universe. It could be asked whether an established architectural review has ever covered even cursorily this major issue. These reviews never go very deeply into anything, obsessed as they are with looks rather than the intelligibly substantive. Even as it is becoming quite evident that contemporary cities and buildings are hard to make safe, to maintain and to manage, they refuse to become more critical.

The only rational meaning of architecture is that, despite its appropriation by architects, it will continue to accompany your physical life, like it or not, as its overall form. Theories always fail, sometimes mysteriously, in vain attempts to put them to practice. Language succeeds as it binds reality unconditionally. Monochromatic films made before 1967 are simply better. These are the three fundamental lessons that experience, through both regrettable and triumphal events over half a century, can teach.