a+t architecture publishers

"As a unit of construction that requires extraordinary geometrical facility from designers who aspire to use it, and as the default material for architecture’s favorite space-ordering devices (walls, arches, vaults, pilasters, columns) the brick is both emblem par excellence of disciplinary organization and the primordial geometric totem upon which the academy repeatedly acts out fantasies of systematic control. This makes the brick a useful straw man. It is a font of un-interrogated comforts that always seem to be in the air when architects talk about 'organization' and 'design.' What do I mean by comforts? I mean the conversationally lubricative ideas, usually unspoken but nonetheless explicit, that furnish automatic concurrence in debates between thinkers who can usually muster disagreement: analgesic ghosts. If something has to suffer pain or possible death by critique I choose to save my own skin by assaulting a thing that can’t feel or is maybe dead already..."

Extract from the essay "People, Process and Products" by Andrew Holder, published in a+t 46 Organization or Design?