As the conflict in Gaza enters its sixth month, Edwin Heathcote reflects on the impossibility of architecture criticism in the face of such devastation.

There are some things that are difficult to write. And there are some things that have become almost impossible.
Is architecture criticism one of these" How can you write about buildings, about houses, about thoughtful plans and neat details while cities are being levelled in real time"
Architecture is hard; construction is in constant conflict with gravity and economy, it is the result of hard physical labour. Destruction is relatively, at least physically, easy. What Eisenhower dubbed the military/industrial complex is a shadowy section of the economy devoted to the design and manufacture of the hardware to destroy buildings. It exists almost as the negative of the construction industry geared to build them. The pace of destruction and the sheer intensity of the loss of life in Gaza have made it impossible to ignore
We are used to seeing the shells of works in progress, those naked concrete frames with deep, dark, shadowy spaces behind, buildings being born. But we have also become used to the reverse process: endlessly mediated images of skeletal structures, their rebars and cables hanging out like viscera, their floors pancaked, the dusty belongings of now flattened families punctuating the rubble (we are not allowed to see bodies, ruins must stand in for them as metaphors for death).
We see fragments of wall...