ABSTRACT
Recent turns in architectural theory all share a reaction against totalizing
analyses.
Hilde Heynen and Gwendolyn Wright1
‘Things’ in architecture have included buildings, obviously, but depending upon the scale
at which we observe and experience the world they also comprise topographies, cities,
streets, houses, schools of architecture and technical colleges, rooms, lintels, lavatories,
windows, lamps, escutcheons and nail heads. With the rise of the digital, however,
these solid, finite and material things are rapidly melting into air. The fluidity of the
modern world, à la Zygmunt Bauman,2 means that the traditional division between
theory and practice, between what architects one hundred years ago would have
understood as the dichotomy of ‘architecture’ and ‘building’, no longer obtains for the
world outside the narrow confines of most contemporary architectural offices and
academies. And yet we urgently need a ‘reality check’, literally understood, in order to
ground architecture, once again, in our material existence. ‘Historians, sociologists and
philosophers compile knowledge without testing it against reality’; so wrote the French
architect Patrick Bouchain,3 hero of this story, in his reclaiming of the art and craft of
building from the reaches of dry, disengaged theory.
