ABSTRACT
The action in Graham Greene's story 'The Destructors', first published in 1954 in the collection Twenty One Stories, takes place in early 50s London in an urban setting redolent of broken down, austere, post-war Britain. Architecture long boasted - at least until a certain modernist functional procrusteanism cut it down to utilitarian size - that it was the 'Mother of All the Arts'. At the same time however, over the period of the last fifty years or so, it could be said that the discipline of architecture has also been expanding its territorial claims anew. Architectural writers like Francesco Careri and Bruno Zevi have pushed the boundaries of architecture back in time, so that the discipline embraces an architectonic history 'before the building'. In his essay 'The Architectural Belief System and Social Behaviour' published in 1969, Alan Lipman noticed a similar 'dilemma' in the position of the post war professional architect.
