ABSTRACT
Mentalities within architecture, urban design, and planning, tend to be primarily rooted within either a rhetorical or an elemental intellectual tradition; albeit that, within architecture, the former might be said to constitute the common, or primary, condition. The examination of architectural mentalities is a messy business. Individual systems of logic are not intellectually coherent, or fixed in space and time. Idealism is an intellectual condition, and its existence does not necessarily imply that mentalities are beneficial, virtuous, or ethical. That post-modern mentalities abandoned responsibility for a social or political status quo does not imply that they were free of the determining bonds of immediate cultural, economic, and political conditions. With respect to how pragmatism in architecture is defined, it is important that the boundaries between architecture, planning and urban design exhibit a tendency to soften as more attention is directed at public space and the space around buildings.
