Sudjic, Deyan

Bio Sketch

Deyan Sudjic is a British architecture critic, writer and curator, former director of the Design Museum in London and former editor of Blueprint and Domus. A leading voice on architecture, design and the city, he is known for his scepticism toward celebrity architecture and the "edifice complex" — the impulse of leaders and institutions to build monumental icons.

Key Works

*The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful—and Their Architects—Shape the World* (2005) — on the political vanity and power behind iconic architecture.
B is for Bauhaus (2014) — essays on design.
The 100 Mile City (1992) — on the contemporary city.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Sudjic's sceptical position in the icon debate (see the 2005 exchange with Jencks) is a key anti-spectacle voice in Geoffrey's spectacle & iconic architecture area: he insists the "Bilbao effect" figures are overstated and that iconic architecture is driven by celebrity, branding and political vanity rather than architectural value.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

Sources in the wiki that draw on Sudjic:

Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — "The Image of the City" (The 100 Mile City, 1992, pp. 295–309) as Luna's image-theory for urban cores: "Population, area, density, and administrative boundaries do not tell the full story of a city. The image of the city depends greatly on who is navigating it. A tourist might only see five percent of a city by visiting its main tourist attractions… These areas are centers of activity that are distributed throughout cities and can be defined as urban cores." The 1992 city-book's anti-statistical realism repurposed as the ground for polycentrality — the city legible through navigation, not statistics.
Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — The 100 Mile City (1992) as a representative text of the Exopolis discourse: the megacity's "expanded scale and galactic form"; the dating claim — "the eighties were the decade in which the industrial city finally shook off the last traces of its nineteenth century self and mutated into a completely new species" (1992, quoted p. 235) — which Soja links to the reversed regional balance of industrialization ("it is this role reversal in the geography of industrial urbanism that has led observers such as Sudjic to claim…," p. 242). Sudjic is also noted (via Castells) as expressing "profound concern for the negative political, social, and cultural repercussions of megacity formation" while agreeing "that this new spatial form is here to stay" (p. 235).