From the Heights of Parnassus

In the future, an intrepid scholar with unparalleled access to archives and a nose for controversy may look at our current moment with some amount of scorn. Blame it on the state of theory and the discipline’s lackluster role in addressing the relationship between buildings, cities, and publics. These were the days when theory carried the unenviable burden of explaining the relations between architecture and other big-ticket, capital-letter items like Capital, Social Justice, Racial Inequality, the list goes on. Form for form’s sake—now that was an enviable endeavor, and fun, too, because it meant that scholars and critics could just let buildings be buildings, nothing more, nothing less. And yet there was something deeply unsatisfying about all of this. This scholar will read transcripts, cached websites, even tattered physical copies of journals of record. And in these artifacts, a breadcrumb trail of sorts reveals how a mode of thinking about the world emerged in texts, was whispered furtively in gallery conversations, became the subject of countless seminars and …