ABSTRACT

This book looks at architecture history in reverse, in order to follow chains of precedents back through time to see how ideas alter the course of civilization in general and the discipline of architecture in particular. Part I begins with present-day attitudes about architecture and traces them back to seminal ideas from the beginning of the twentieth century. Part II examines how pre-twentieth-century societies designed and understood architecture, how they strove to create communal physical languages, and how their disagreements set the stage for our information age practices. Architecture History and Theory in Reverse includes 45 black-and-white images and will be useful to students of architecture and literature.

chapter

Introduction

chapter |4 pages

Epilogue

Today, in the Beginning …

part I|104 pages

Architecture in an Information Age

chapter 1|12 pages

Twenty-First-Century Trajectories

chapter 2|12 pages

Modernity’s Legacy in a New Millennium

chapter 3|8 pages

A Postmodern Profession, Circa 1991

chapter 4|13 pages

Formal or Phenomenological

A Feud over Information

chapter 6|13 pages

Mies van der Rohe in Chicago

chapter 7|10 pages

Language Games

chapter |8 pages

Interlude

The Information Reformation, or This Killed That

part II|125 pages

Architecture in Eras of Meaning

chapter 9|11 pages

16 June 1904

Ulysses and The Uncanny

chapter 10|12 pages

Marx, Meaning, and Matter

chapter 11|12 pages

Exchange and Evolution

chapter 12|15 pages

In what style?

Epistemes and Monsters

chapter 13|14 pages

The Précis and the Paternity of Perception

chapter 14|12 pages

De Sade Versus Descartes

Competing Conceptions of Language

chapter 15|15 pages

The Tense of Abstract Nouns

chapter 16|9 pages

Vitruvian Cycles 1

Representations Against Space

chapter 17|12 pages

Vitruvian Cycles 2

Physical Language and Shared Experience

chapter |11 pages

Prologue: Babel…