I know it's only architecture, but I...

A great Things post about the discrepancy between the seamless world of the architecture journals and the majority of what actually gets built. This is something I've been harping on about for ages, and this puts the case very eloquently - a situation where the exclusivity of fashionable (pseudo?)Modernism enables the architect to continue to maintain a critical pose, no matter how many oligarchs one might build for (NB someone please tell me when I start getting too self-righteous). And yet...I can't agree with the conclusion here, the possibility of just being architecture and dropping any oppositional stance to this society and its built environment (no matter how silly, hypocritical or deluded). I'd prefer something that quite straightforwardly presented itself as being more than architecture - the politics by proxy that a Simon Jenkins so rightly considers a threat to everything he holds dear.