The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a
deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
Gawker, a gossip website subject to various debates about whether or not it constitutes a reliable source
Blog which makes no mention of the contest
Dead
Listing in a "site of the week" listicle
Broken link to a 2007 book. I could not find the book on GBooks to verify how substantially it covers the topic
Primary source
Seemingly self-published source
In short, this was a one-shot joke contest done almost two decades ago and had no lasting impact. I could find no third party coverage of this contest whatseover. I suggested a merge to
Cabinet Magazine in the last AFD (all the way back in 2008) but it was never executed; however, given the obscurity of this contest relative to the magazine, a merge to either the magazine or
Ypsilanti Water Tower, the building that won, would be
WP:UNDUE. Ten Pound Hammer • (
What did I screw up now?)04:30, 24 March 2022 (UTC)reply
More documentation has appeared since 2008, and that definitely needs consideration. Furthermore, it doesn't take much effort to find some of the above if one does more than merely expect a hyperlink from 14 years ago to work.
The "dead link" for
Brendan 2006 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFBrendan2006 (
help) is because the LA Times has shuffled its WWW presence around since 2008. It is
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-feb-21-et-book21-story.html now, which can be found by using the rest of the citation. The book reviewed is Ames's
ISBN9781555845926 of course. Ironically, the book review doesn't tell us anything more than a chapter title and that the chapter is "about, among other things, buying fruit and walking past the bank".
The ISBN for the 2007 book (
ISBN3936314772) takes me to it on Google Books, where it comes up with a German title, explaining why you could not find it I suspect. It's citing the dust jacket, of all things, which says:
The Agbar Tower's distinctive rounded crown had already earned it a nominee spot in Cabinet Magazine's Most Phallic Building in the World Contest. Here, the Highrise Award's more serious honor cites the building's expressive shape, pulsating dynamism and a multi-layer outer skin that generates its varied and exciting appearance.
It's a dust jacket blurb. I knew it wouldn't be in depth from that alone.
ISBN9780759123144 is a 2014 encyclopaedia which has an "Architecture" entry that has this in it on page 12. The (first) author is a professor of Sociology at
Stony Brook University this time. Given this and Williams's section heading ("Phallic Towers"), if even if the instant subject were too minor, there's clearly a
phallic architecture topic to be had since 2014. And — Lo! — there it is, already at the words that I simply hyperlinked without looking, the obvious supertopic that is neither the magazine nor the water tower, created in 2012.
Rounding off with a rebuttal of the "but it's undue" argument, I point out that the Ypsilanti Historical Society mentioned the contest in its own 2008 article on the tower. The local historical society doesn't think it undue.
Rudisill, Alvin E. (Summer 2008).
"The Ypsilanti Water Tower"(PDF). Ypsilanti Gleanings. Ypsilanti Historical Society. pp. 4–5.
Merge. I came to this article, expecting an easy in-and-out !vote, but then I found myself searching long and hard, up and down, and back and forth for sources to support this content. Carefully, I examined the sources dangling at the bottom of the article, checking each for weight. Delicately I probed around the subject, hoping to find just the right spot on the web that could prove this was independently notable. Alas, after all of my exertions, the article hangs limp before me, unsupported, not backed up with any firm sources we could use to erect an article establishing notability. Certainly, there is enough to shrink it down and package it up and merge it into
Phallic architecture, but here, on it's own, hanging in the wind, I don't think it's notable. I did find this
alumni magazine that had another insignificant mention, but I think Uncle G found everything else that I did.
ScottishFinnishRadish (
talk)
11:29, 25 March 2022 (UTC) Here I am, over a year and 20,000 edits later, still making
jokes at Ten Pound Hammer's AfD submissions.reply
Merge per above. There's enough here for a sentence or two at the Phallic architecture article, probably not enough for a full article. --
Jayron3212:46, 25 March 2022 (UTC)reply
I have to go with delete on this one and oppose merging. The
phallic architecture article is a junky synthesis of the ubiquity of phallic sculptures in non-Christian cultures, some feminist theory, and a lame list of buildings; but at least it's trying to be serious. This contest isn't, and it gets next to no GHits. I just don't see anything here that ought to be saved.
Mangoe (
talk)
04:30, 31 March 2022 (UTC)reply
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a
deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.