Stephen Fry on Christopher Hitchen's love of the craft of argument:

With a deep understanding that the connection between style and substance is absolute; that a true thing badly expressed is no more than a lie.

I have two things in common with Christopher Hitchens: a great passion for well crafted discourse and we had both been diagnosed with cancer at about the same time. I took comfort in reading Hitchens so well articulate an experience similar to my own:

To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

While I would never claim to have anywhere near the intellect and wit of Hitchens, few could, today I learned, sadly, that I've faired much better than he with cancer.

Christopher Hitchens died today at 62 and with that passing we've lost one of the great defenders of humanism of this or any generation. We've also lost a craftsman of the highest order.

I'm a designer. I solve problems or, more accurately, I craft solutions. Simpler still, I argue. Design is argument. At its simplest, a house is an argument against homelessness. A logo is an argument for disambiguity and recognition. A well planned neighbourhood is an argument against traffic congestion, alienation and sprawl.

Reading Hitchens, or listening to him, is a master class in crafting an argument, in concision, efficiency and clarity. Hitchens hones every sentence; his arguments are exquisitely designed tools as beautiful to behold as any well crafted chef's knife or carefully appointed garden.

The field of design, so easily swayed by fashion and ideogical tribalism, is sorely in need of the kind of carefully reasoned discourse that Hitchens was so passionate about. The kind of robust and human rationalism that Hitchens employed should be the first tool we reach for as designers so that we may find deeper solutions for our troubled times.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses.

Hitch.On location.

“The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Lewis Mumford

As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme — the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before. Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.

That last sentence is, with out a doubt, my favourite piece of design commentary for 2011.

The rest of the article can be found here.