Tom Dyckhoff writes…
Jul 17th, 2007Tom Dyckhoff, the architecture critic at The Times, has written an essay especially for this blog:
They didn’t have spellcheck back in 1982. Which is a shame because Zaha could have done with it. To a word-nerd like me, raised by lupine subeditors who think Lynne Truss is a wuss, and to whom every last apostrophe, every last correctly placed pronoun is a thing of exquisite beauty, close to divinity, the blurb in the exhibition accompanying her winning entry for the early-80s competition to build a luxury club, The Peak, in Hong Kong is enough to start palpitations. There are the inevitable mangled apostrophes (“it’s” instead of “its”), wayward or absent commas, the misspellings (“seperate”), the John Prescott sentences (“following the demolishment of the existing apartments”), the non-sequiturs that actually start out quite nicely (“the architecture appears like a knife cutting through butter devastating all the traditional principles”). Read the rest of this entry »
