I just had a nightmare

With all this "Five Best This" and "Ten Best That" stuff going around the blogosphere, someone is going to do a "Best Buildings" post.

Such list-making mental exercises may be fun or even useful when it comes to movies or 19h century novels or whatever. But the idea of "Best Building" or "Best House" or "Best Gas Station" is just too silly. (That last one might actually be of some interest simply because so few people ever even thinks of gas stations).

"Silly" only because it would involve and imply some set of standards or rules by which to judge. And since very few people who write about buildings in the real world media have any discernible criteria by which to judge -- just go read their work and see if you can tease out the reasons why they are so often aflutter -- they will either have to make those criteria explicit so their list makes sense or simply present a list with text from a random-word generator, only making sure that the words "genius" and "brilliant" are sprinkled throughout.

Comments

[JRoth]

Just FYI, there is a book called Pump and Circumstance that celebrates the design of gas stations (as well as their attendant paraphrenalia). Came out maybe 10 years ago. Great images, lots of stuff I never knew (esp. about prefab gas stations from surprisingly early in the 20th C.). Worth a look.

[Joseph Clarke]

The reason critics don't have a list of "criteria" is that, for all its practical/functional components, architecture is still an art. Nobody has ever come up with a comprehensive set of criteria by which to judge art, and nobody ever will.

[David Sucher]

"...architecture is still an art..." eh?
Well we'll just let that lie there for a while. It seems to me that one of our central problems is that so many people believe actually believe that.