David Sokol is the acting news editor at Architectural Record, and has written for ID magazine, Metropolis, and others. This article will appear in the forthcoming Public Relations, RISD architecture’s new annual.

Let me tell you a secret. I don’t drink the Kool-Aid known as archi-babble. Really, you care. As an editor and writer, I scout for emerging architects and new designs to publish. And I may pass you by if you’re more prattle than substance.

But this point is so well trodden that I’ve asked the gods to send me a press release, a media kit, something, that states my case better than I could articulate it myself.

Et voila, without tactlessly naming names, here’s an invitation for the final performances of a site-specific work. Let’s choose a few opening excerpts about the artist: “…She challenges the traditional notion of facade as constituting a membrane that simultaneously separates and erotically joins the inside with the outside.”

Neat. Our subject will one-up Vito Acconci by pleasuring herself in a doorjamb, or straddling a windowsill, in full public view.

“Her live performances reflect the tension between art and architecture as a conflict between what is aesthetically pleasing (the seduction of surfaces, facades or the face itself) and the realization that our experience of space is circumscribed and curtailed by the very structures we inhabit.”

Um, all right, perhaps she’s masturbating some Bulthaup cabinets while wearing a prison uniform. Perhaps a copy of Discipline and Punish sits on the counter, representing the shade of Foucault as he blithely takes in the scene.

Well, it turns out that our subject will be strapped in a metal chair, with varying instruments prodding, pulling, and stretching her face into a series of excruciating contortions. What this has to do with our premise, I quote: “The face is rendered empty like an architectural element open to interaction and dialog. At the same time, it also appears immobile [sic] a grimace, a mask. Surprisingly, the fusion of mobile and immobile elements causes the architecture of the face to move and facial expressions to dissolve.” I’ll rephrase my question. WTF?

While our subject is an artist, her esoteric lexicon and garbled-masquerading-as-intellectual syntax has infiltrated architecture. Could the democratization of design have inspired such pretension — that the profession is resorting to fancy language to place itself above the Wallpaper* reader?

This much I do know. Self-torture is almost too juicy to resist. But let’s face it, I’m a member of the media. I mediate. I have to assume my audience wants to understand what I write, and I may not have the time or prowess to weave clarity from our largely incomprehensible art performance.