ABSTRACT
A mentality is a narrative that is suited to an immediate context. It is by means of such narratives that, for example, modernism and its utopias assisted the advancement of capitalism and allied developments in urban and social planning. The assumption that architecture is in some way autonomous, or is subject to its own rules, can allow some realities to be denied; and especially those that have a cultural, socio-economic or political content. As an element of the rhetorical tradition, autonomy implies that architecture has an inherent power to carry meanings that can survive through time and space. Determinism is a relatively blunt instrument through which power is awarded directly to the environmental object. The mechanisms of autonomy, determinism, and historicism were tied together, for example, in tendencies of the 1970s-80s that fed on a mixture of utopianism and the notion of 'autonomous form'.
