Full Marks

With its expository spine and laconic cover, Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech, looks like just another compendium of recent architecture. (No surprise that Studio Lin is credited as designer.) But don’t be fooled: in my estimation, the book is the single most important document for making sense of architecture today. By taking a perspicacious view of three decades of development, from the late 1980s on, it situates the discipline on a new footing. This has been a beguiling period. It began in the wake of postmodernism, with its meandering search for a shared language of architecture, and it continues into the present without any sign of consensus forming around parametricism, the post-critical, the post-digital, or any other contender for theoretical hegemony. In short, it’s a time of soul-searching—and Inscriptions unexpectedly outlines why this religious analogy is more than an empty trope. More on that later.

To its gre…