In the discussion of architecture, the prevailing sentiment of the past decades has been that cultural production can no longer be understood to arise spontaneously, as a matter of social course, but is constructed through ever more self-conscious theoretical procedures. The development of interpretive modes of various stripes – poststructuralist, Marxian, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, as well as others dissenting or eccentric – has given scholars a range of tools for rethinking architecture in relation to other fields and for reasserting architecture’s general importance in intellectual discourse.
This long-awaited anthology ‘Architecture Theory Since 1968‘ is in some sense a sequel to Joan Ockman’s ‘Architecture Culture 1943-1968, A Documentary Anthology‘ (1993). It presents forty-seven of the primary texts of contemporary architecture theory, introducing each by detailing the concepts and categories necessary for its understanding and evaluation.
