Twenty Minutes in Manhattan

I stopped reading about technology because it was getting depressing. I started reading Michael Sorkin's Twenty Minutes in Manhattan. It's hard to say what it is yet, I'm only a chapter into it. One thing I can say is Sorkin drops names like mad but the names of places not people; he seems to expect his entire audience to have PhD's in Architectural History. I was thinking about a long term project where I post images for everything he references (excepting his own building and personal stuff). I would take on the role of Google Image Search. The only reason I would even consider this is I'm certain I would benefit from actually looking the things up myself and it isn't that much harder to go the extra step and post the images here.

Still, there is an added element of reverence here I am aware of. Sorkin edited a book called Variations on a Theme Park which is both the best title of an architecture book ever and the closest anyone has ever come to Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in a strange category of "exactly what you would expect given the title". The text of Complexity adds almost literally nothing to the title. By almost literally, I mean two words, "I like..." Having given his view, Venturi lists some prominent examples. My view is the title is so captivating, like an epigraph from Tacitus, it convinced an entire generation of architects to follow Venturi's lead. They sold themselves for a song (and the rejection of the pitiless, cheap, careless shell of a style Modernism had degenerated into). Variations is composed of essays, so there is more meat to it but you still don't need anything more than the title to understand the argument. I tried to buy a signed first edition once because I think it is the best title of an architecture book ever (edging out Colin Rowe's The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa only because Rowe means geometry, not math) but it was strangely inexpensive so I assumed it was damaged. It turns out it just isn't as popular as the great title would suggest.