Category Archives: Editorial

The Outlaw Urbanist editorials.

Art, Books, Editorial, Mark David Major, Press, Review

BOOK REVIEW | Think Different, Be “Insanely Great” | Steve Jobs | Walter Isaacson

Think Different, Be “Insanely Great”
BOOK REVIEW of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
by Mark David Major, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am writing this review on my MacBook Pro with Retina Display with my iPhone and iPad Mini sitting near at hand while I listen to a shuffle of classical music in my iTunes Library. When I started writing this disclosure paragraph, I noticed my apps were syncing to all of my devices via iCloud, which finished well before I had completed this paragraph. I have been an unapologetic member of the Apple Cult since 1993.

A few times in Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, the biographer and his subject admit there will be a lot that Jobs won’t like in this authorized biography. Once again, Steve Jobs was right. Isaacson’s biography is not a great product. The writing is often repetitive, even diverging into triviality on occasion, with the biographer/interviewees (except Jobs himself) all too eager to engage in ‘Dime Store’ Freudian psychoanalysis about the book’s subject. At 656 pages, Isaacson’s biography would have benefited from the same zeal for simplicity and minimalism (in terms of editing) that characterized so many of Apple’s products during Jobs’ two tenures at the company. In fact, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson reads like Simon & Schuster rushed the book to market months ahead of schedule so it could financially capitalize on Jobs’ death in late 2011. The release date is a mere two weeks after Jobs death on October 5, 2011. This is something Jobs would have never tolerated while he was alive. Isaacson’s biography is not a bad book but it could have been “insanely great” like its subject. There are many useful, some wonderful insights (usually originating from Jobs himself) contained within, so it is well worth your time to read. In the end, what shines through in the book, despite its problems, is the genius and greatness of Steve Jobs.

Isaacson’s fairly ridiculous thesis is Jobs was driven to greatness by a desire to prove his natural parents were wrong to put him up for adoption, which begs the question why there aren’t more industry leaders with adoptive parents. Jobs is fairly dismissive of this line of thought. Isaacson’s equally ridiculous aim is to get his subject to admit, “He is an asshole.” We are all angels and assholes (some, more one than other). It is called being human so it’s unclear why this is important. Jobs was a perfectionist but he never (thankfully) claimed he was perfect. Many of Jobs management techniques are tried, tested and effective even if Jobs’ form of brutal honesty lacked a ‘politeness’ filter. Anyone successful, who has been in a leadership position, will recognize these techniques.

Isaacson devotes a considerable amount of words to Jobs’ tendency to construct a “reality distortion field”, an ability to weld or ignore reality to his wishes but also compel designers and engineers to do the seemingly impossible. We all construct “reality distortion fields” in an attempt to warp reality to our wishes. Some are more successful and ambitious at it than others. It is unclear why Isaacson finds this distinctive human trait so compelling other than the fact Jobs changed the reality of the way things work in this world. The fact is there are many people in the world, who simply cannot abide greatness in their presence. They seek to bring genius down to their level, a sort of “stupidity distortion field.” Jobs would describe this as Grade C people bringing down the Grade A people around them to the average, “the ugly”, or the “totally shit”. Isaacson could easily devote an entire book to how otherwise seemingly intelligent people (like Bill Gates, who comes across as a decent and pleasant schmuck but a schmuck nonetheless) adopt stupid arguments, decisions, and positions to distort the greatness or genius of individuals around them. The fact is there are more like Steve Jobs out there but the herd is too busy trampling them under foot to recognize them. In the end, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is best when all aspects of Jobs (the good and the bad) filter through the biographer’s gaze. Was Steve Jobs perfect? No, he was human. Personally, I never asked for Apple products to be perfect. I only asked that Apple products be the best in the world and, usually, they were. I never asked Steve Jobs to be anything than what he was: a brilliant businessman, an insight artist, and a (sometimes) source and (often) shepherd of technological innovation. In the end, what was remarkable about Steve Jobs was not that he changed the world but he changed the world in the face of the ‘conventional wisdom’, which is often polite code for the stupidity of the consensus. Frankly, I prefer to live in Jobs’ reality. Along the way, he lived a remarkable life. Surely, that is enough. The world seems smaller without Steve Jobs in it. We have Jobs’ Apple to thank for it but it is also a testament to the legacy of Steve Jobs. He will be missed.

I’m attaching video links to a couple of seminal moments in the life of Steve Jobs. First, the famous 1984 MacIntosh commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, which aired during the Super Bowl (above in the body of the review). Many in the trade (including TV Guide) say it is the greatest commercial ever. Second, is the famous commencement address Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005 (see below). Remember: think different.

 

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover, 656 pages
Available from Amazon here.

 

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Architecture, Concrete Blonde, Editorial, Press

Let’s Talk About Sex | Architectural Record

Concrete Blonde sent a link to the below editorial in The Architectural Record by its Editor in Chief, Cathleen McGuigan, as a follow-up from our earlier post on The Outlaw Urbanist (Comment: We need women designing buildings). Concrete Blonde thinks Ms. McGuigan made some good points and added to the discussion about women in architecture.

Excerpt:

For several months now, we’ve been reaching out to architects to talk about the status of women in the profession. Even before the Architects’ Journal published its scathing survey of how women in architecture are treated in the U.K.—and well before two students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design launched their petition to pressure the Pritzker Prize committee to recognize architect and planner Denise Scott Brown, who was excluded from the 1991 award bestowed on her partner, Robert Venturi—we had begun to report on the inequities that persist in the field. What was striking was that many women didn’t want to talk on the record about their concerns. They just want their work acknowledged—and please, they said, we’re “architects,” not “women architects.”

Read the full article here: Let’s Talk About Sex – Architectural Record.

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Architecture, Editorial, Mark David Major, Poor Richard, Urban Planning

More Poor Richard | Part 1

More Poor Richard, Part 1
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

Courteous Reader,

I attempted to win your favor when I wrote my first Almanac for Architects and Planners, in the name of the public good and professional betterment, by way of earning some profit and a wife. I am gratified by your expression of encouragement for my tireless efforts dedicated to these aims. Alas, my circumstances still find me exceedingly poor and, unluckily, exceedingly wifeless. I am required to earn some profit to address both problems whilst now addressing a third, namely testing the proposition that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” To satisfy my own particular brand of insanity, I have written more proverbs and whimsical sayings for your benefit and, hopefully, my own.

As before on The Outlaw Urbanist, I write this new Almanac in increments of ten, according to the dictates of Moses and the Almighty. However, once published as an Almanac for Architects and Planners, the proverbs and witticisms were gathered into a number equal to the days of the week, after being reliably informed that both seven and ten are sacred numbers. My desired requirement for a wife is sufficient motive to write this new Almanac in the hope it will find your favor and retweets as a means of demonstrating the usefulness of my continued efforts but also your charity to this sane Friend and poor Servant,

Richard

On Cities

1.    As big as the road, so will the car be.

2.    When American urban designers and planners developed an allergic reaction to straight lines and right angles, our cities started sneezing phlegm all over the place.

3.    A ‘road to nowhere’ is much less important than all the ‘somewheres’ it will eventually lead.

4.    Suburban sprawl breeds idiotic driving behaviors.

5.    Interruptus en extremis isn’t any good for urban life… or your sex life.

6.     Pursuing (politically palatable) green spaces to the exclusion of (hard choice) urbanity is a self-defeating proposition. We have that, it’s called suburban sprawl.

7.     Observe the world around you before daring to create anew.

8.     Every city should have at least one Electric Avenue we gonna rock down and then take it higher… perhaps even two.

9.     The pattern of great cities is at once sensuous and logical; elegant with the past, restless in the present, and pregnant with future potential.

10.    Part is to whole as whole is to part in the city.

Issue 2 of More Poor Richard for Architects and Planners cometh soon!

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Editorial, News, Political Action

A Dark Curtain Falls Across the Middle East

A Dark Curtain Falls Across the Middle East
by Dr. Mark David Major,  AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

NOTE: We are momentarily stepping away from urban subjects to discuss bigger issues However, the anti-government protests in Turkey did originate in the realm of urban development.

Incrementally, inch-by-inch, from the shores of Tripoli to the Bosporus Straits to the Khyber Pass, there is a dark curtain falling across the Middle East. It was the late writer, Christopher Hitchens, who coined the phrase “Islamo-Fascism” after 9/11. He did so to accurately characterize this latest threat to the principles of liberty and justice. This is the “inheritance” Winston Churchill traced in his famous Iron Curtain speech “through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find(ing) their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence” Over the last decade, we have abbreviated Hitchens’ term into the shorthand term of “Jihadist”. However, Hitchens original formulation remains precise because it recognizes the very long history of totalitarianism (too long to recount here) and 20th century flirtation with the fascism of Nazi Germany in the Middle East. In the post-war period, this history of tyranny and flirtation with genocide metastasized around an expressed goal: the destruction of Israel.

Like Libya before it, Jihadists have infiltrated the pro-democracy rebellion in Syria while Hezbollah fighters enter the country in support of the tyrannical government of Bashar al-Assad. In essence, this rebellion now pits one model of tyranny against another with the democratic elements poised to be sidelined/eliminated once their immediate usefulness against the Assad government is over. Jihadists used the grassroots, pro-democracy protests of the Arab Spring as a springboard to political power in Egypt. Now Islamic-rooted Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s riot police used tear gas and pressurized water hoses in a dawn raid on Friday against a peaceful sit-in to prevent the uprooting of trees at a local park. The initial protest has expanded beyond urban renewal issues to demonstrations against new laws recently enacted that restrict the sale and advertising of alcohol and public displays of affection (i.e. kissing). The implications for the West of ‘losing Turkey’ (which already has a Jihadist-tainted government) are profound.

What is American and Western policy towards the Middle East? Does anybody know? It appears to wildly fluctuate from situation to situation and moment to moment. Our policy circles around the strategic signpost “to keep the oil flowing” while veering back and forth between (often mistaken) tactical assessments about what is easy (i.e. Libya, intervene; Afghanistan, surge) or what is hard (i.e. Syria, stay out of it; Iraq; get out), which is to say there is no coherent policy at all. This is no way for a “great” county and civilization (which we aspire to and often claim on behalf of the United States and Western Europe) to conduct its affairs. Given these conditions, it should not be a surprise to anyone the “huddle masses yearning to breathe free” on the Arab streets are befuddled and frustrated by the incoherent policies of the United States and Western Europe. After 9/11, the United States and Western Europe made a mistake. It was an honest mistake because it was born of anger but a mistake nonetheless. We thought Al-Qaeda’s attack was about us. It was not, it was about power. Subsequent events in the Middle East have demonstrated the agenda of the Jihadists is to achieve political power, oppress liberal-minded citizens and thought (such as Christianity), and accumulate power for its own sake. In his second augural address, George W. Bush attempted to frame the current threat on more solid footing as a struggle against tyranny, liberty versus oppression, and the dreams of freedom for the many in opposition to the pursuit of power by a few.

Many in the West ridiculed this reframing by the American President into the “Freedom Agenda” as hopelessly naïve. You cannot fight and defeat an idea. Of course, they are correct. However, ideas take on recognizable forms. In democratic societies, these forms include free markets, freedom of movement, and tolerance of the Other. In oppressive regimes, they take the form of financial corruption, the elevation of state power over individual liberty, and intolerance of the Other. You fight and defeat the forms that tyranny takes in the world. It is time for the United States and the West to revisit its Cold War model and adapt the mechanism for this new threat. This includes the expansion of domestic oil production in North America in order to wean our societies (and, increasingly, China) off the teat of Middle Eastern oil. For the first time in decades, the United States is exporting oil. We need to rapidly expand this capacity. North American should be the principal supplier of oil to China lest we lose a (potentially) powerful ally in the coming struggle to the same dependency, which caused us to indirectly finance the current threat. In the process, we need to get our fiscal house in order. A new policy should include containment. We must develop a strategy for the Middle East to halt the expansion of Islamo-Fascism, which includes modernizing (perhaps even expanding) our nuclear deterrent and reconstituting the doctrine of having the military capacity to fight two wars simultaneously. As part of this containment strategy, we will have to recognize and accept we may lose some countries (like Egypt) along the way but, in the modern era of globalization, mass communications, and the internet, these are more likely to be temporary situations. A similar transition as witnessed during the Cold War is likely to occur at a much more rapid rate (taking years instead of decades). Finally, we must actively engage in destabilizing these tyrannical regimes by any means necessary, including clandestine activities, expanded intelligence gathering ‘on the ground’, Wi-Fi American Free (a modern adaption of the Radio Free Europe concept) and filtering financial support to grassroots democratic movements. Our view should be on the end game, not the distractions of the moment. And our end game should always be to grow the “tree of liberty” for all, lest we condemn more than 300 million people to the darkness.

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Architecture, Concrete Blonde, Editorial, News, Press

Comment | We Need Women Designing Buildings | CNN.com

1 Comment

Opinion: We need women designing buildings – CNN.com

We Need to Prize Talent, not Self-Promotion
by Dr. Mark David Major, AICP, CNU-A, The Outlaw Urbanist contributor

Denise Scott Brown should (have) be(en) recognized with Robert Venturi for the 1991 Pritzker Prize. However, the ongoing debate on this subject is frustrating. It is frustrating because the ideal of gender equality expounded for the architectural profession – and, by implication, other professions –  too often relies on arguments that are, at best, manifestly superficial and, at worse, reinforce the gender stereotypes underlying the problem.

This particular debate has not been helped by public comments (perhaps taken of out context) by both Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown that do not ‘hold water’ in explaining why she was not recognized with Venturi for the Pritzker Prize in the first place. For example, in the above CNN article, Scott Brown is quoted as saying””we could not afford to pass up the Pritzker Prize for the sake of our fledgling firm.” It seems far-fetched to describe Venturi Scott Brown and Associates as a “fledgling firm” in 1991. A Wikipedia listing of their selected works identifies four major projects in 1991, more than any other year listed over a 44-year period (Source: Wikipedia). Quite the opposite, in fact, since it is fair to argue the late 80s/early 90s represents the earning power highpoint for Venturi Scott Brown’s particular brand of post-modern architecture in the profession. Venturi and Scott Brown’s public comments suggest they are protecting somebody for the initial oversight, either Venturi himself or The Hyatt Foundation, which organizes and awards the Pritzker Prize.

However, this is a side issue to larger problems: namely, the promotion of talent, in general, and insidious effects of gender discrimination, in particular, in the architectural profession. Marika Shioiri-Clark and John Cary’s CNN opinion piece manages to negatively typify these problems at a gross level while still being right in some of its details. First, we do not need “women designing buildings.” This is the same superficial argument we have heard from feminists for decades; namely, if we only elected women to political leadership we would have world peace. Female political leaders have proven time and time again over the last 40 years that equality has nothing to do with their gender and everything to do with how women can be equally inspirational, vicious, divisive and (in)competent as their male counterparts. Instead, what we need are talented people (women and men) designing buildings. We should have zero interest in promoting mediocre architects, regardless of their gender.

As Shioiri-Clark and Cary correctly point out, female architectural students regularly outperform their male counterparts in school, substantially so in our experience. If the profession truly prized and promoted talent, female architects would naturally rise to the top because there lies the talent (sorry, male architects but it is true). However, the profession is still trapped within the grips of the (often self-manufactured) ‘myth of architectural genius’. This practice prizes the architect’s ability to self-promote and network that myth in the profession, popular media, and books. In doing so, the superficial is valued over the substantive in architecture (very post-modern, indeed). Unfortunately, the profession’s manifest failure to promote talent also sweeps women architects out of the limelight as a result. Once you get pass the names Zaha Hadid, Denise Scott Brown and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, it’s damn difficult to name any superstar women architects. It’s even worse for planners (Jane Jacobs was an economist, so don’t even try it). However, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.” Our vision is my-opic (literally and metaphorically).

Shioiri-Clark and Cary also correctly call out the Architectural Registration Exam (ARE) process for institutionalizing discriminatory practices against women but then incorrectly name the reason (i.e. financial). The real discriminatory practice against women associated with the ARE lies in the limit to a 6-month reporting period for the Intern Development Program (IDP). When a woman temporarily leaves the workforce to bear a child, the typical disruption to her career is much longer than 6 months. Sure, there are some ‘super’ women out there in the profession, for whom this is not the case. They may work until 4-6 weeks before giving birth and return to work 3-4 weeks afterwards. But, more typically, the disruption to a woman’s career extends over a two-year period from the early decision-making stages of pregnancy to the early childhood-raising stages after birth. Let’s be honest, given the supreme and unchallenged role that mothers play in raising their children (especially compared to fathers), the real disruption is 18 years… or even a lifetime. In any case, the one thing the profession could do today to promote gender equality and enable more women to become registered architects is extend the reporting period for IDP to two years.

In their opinion piece, Shioiri-Clark and Cary then transition to the visibility of women architects in the profession. If we focus the question on the promotion of talent instead of valuing the promotion of self, then this is the same problem, i.e. the crème will rise to the top if we value talent.

Architect Barbie: She is clearly not wearing enough black to be an architect.

At this point, the Shioiri-Clark and Cary article takes a mind-bogglingly bizarre turn to discuss “Architect Barbie”, which manages to be both comical and hypocritical, thereby undercutting every point they are trying to make in the article. Perhaps it’s true that Shioiri-Clark and Cary only do this to spark controversy and drive visitor hits on the article. However, when it comes to the larger question of gender discrimination, it’s hard to get more inconsequential than discussing dolls within the context of a serious subject.

Shioiri-Clark and Cary close the article by further expounding further on the ‘world would be a better place if it was run by women’ argument/fallacy. It would not be any different except women would more equally share in the blame for our problems as well as the praise when those problems are solved. That is true equality. So give Denise Scott Brown her share of the 1991 Pritzker Prize but women and men should not make the mistake of thinking it addresses the real problem in the profession. At this point, the Pritzker Prize controversy is a distraction from that problem, which is promoting and prizing talent, whatever the gender. If the playing field was level in this regard, there is little doubt women would rise en masse to the top of the profession… and our built environment would, indeed, be better served.

Read the full CNN.com article here: Opinion | We need women designing buildings – CNN.com

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