ABSTRACT
What I propose in this work is a critical hermeneutic of the ideology of contempomry architectural design review. The concept of ideology is, of course, a notoriously difficult and dynamically charged issue within the domain of critical thought. Its orthodox defmition as a socially generated illusion or collective false-consciousness has repeatedly been challenged as both reductionist and overly dependent upon the dichotomy between reality and appearance. These problems, to some degree, have been recently addressed and the theory of ideology reformulated to accommodate the critiques of post-structuralism. Often, however, the operation has been simply linguistic; the re-naming of a previous concept. Much of what ideology means still remains. Ideology still concerns the power interest of ideas. It is the process of encoding emotive attitudes relevant to the reproduction of the existing social hierarchy. It is a systematic illusion that mystifies and legitimates dominative politics. Simply stated. ideological constructions justify the world as it is. Critique, on the other hand, is the process of dismantling and dissecting the monoliths of truth, of seeking out those blind spots or moments of self-contradiction where discourse betrays the tension between rhetoric and logic. Ideological critique involves the identification and deciphering of the social myths that constinlte and reinforce relations of domination. It is also a thinking otherwise and a radical questioning of the hegemony of a priori reasoning. Reason is no longer accepted as an immutable given. To reason is to interpret, because reason is itself an interpretation, as we have learned from Nietzsche.
