I’ll let you in on a secret. I really can’t stand theory. Don’t get me wrong - I can understand the value of frameworks. I recognize that, sometimes, common elements repeat in patterns and trends that can provide insight into activities, events and environments.

I also admit that there are a whole lot of people with test tubes, accelerators, gene sequencers, huge friggin telescopes and very sharp pencils who have revealed fundamental truths about the very atoms and dark matter around us.

Those people have a pass from me.

You know what sort of theory really turns me off? A theory that uses adjectives, exaggeration and too broad a brush to lay claim to predictability or even certainty.

Sorry, all you social scientists. Unless you back your theory up with practical, demonstrable and measurable examples, you’re just waving your hands around.

So where is this curmudgeonliness coming from? The current trend among social media gurus to weave shallow but broad discourses about conversation, community and consultation without referring to any actual research, science or analysis.

Or, as some would tag it, an increasingly reductive attempt at self-justification.

Since any good theory is only improved by skillfully extracting supporting quotes from barely relevant reference material, let me return to my recent reading: two architecture compilations:

Guess which one I preferred? It’s the one that includes this quote from Jorge Mario Jauregui, an architect, about the favelas of Rio de Janeiro:

“When a new, planned building rises in the slum - be it a public toilet or a sewing co-operative - it immediately becomes a monument. It was conceived by an architect, it indicates things are changing: people understand they now have the right to what was only available in the so-called “formal city.”

Or this one, from an early developer of crisis housing:

“[Architects] were typically doing these Darth Vader things with helicopters and gee-whiz materials. They came at it with a lot of enthusiasm or commercial interest. There was a lot of experimentation going on. The fact that shelter had to come out of local material and processes eluded these people. When you told them that you can build a permanent house in Bangladesh in three days for the same amount of money they were proposing to spend on temporary housing, they ignored you.”

As for IN-EX 01, I found a lot of talk of honesty, truth, harmony, authorship, art and inspiration - and an unsettling lack of modesty or architecture that reflected the reality around it. (maybe I’m being pedantic, provincial and uninspired. Hey. That’s me!)

“Rudy Ricciotti: People will stop at nothing to give you a guilty conscience. I’ve seen hatred and scorn heaped on the concert hall by the architectural community, asking ‘But what is it supposed to be? The cult of objects, an ego trip?” And yet I’d made sense of something that had no sense: it was a rubbish dump before. For me, it was a political (poetic) act, with no violence. I finally told them all to go to hell!

Naturally, it’s so much better to produce obsequious architecture, with a few smooth slabs, some deep joints, a few mullion windows in the right places, and a referential horizontal plane here and there.”

There you go. To paraphrase: You may not like my work, but I think your work is overwrought and overly intellectual. But, together, we form a brotherhood that can claim sole ownership of the art and the product.

And let the proles pay to witness and benefit from our magic.