The intention here is to publicize provocative positions, playing the devil's advocate or no, to raise questions and issues pertaining to contemporary architecture theory. Most of the statements below are put in the strongest form possible, so that potential critics will at least get the point and have something to chew on.

architecture theory is fun, well, sort of

Before now, theory has been predominantly a system to provide captions for photographs and justifications for both good and bad architects. In schools, theory has been used to teach history and prepare students for being good and bad architects.

Architectural practice is always highly politicized and culturally significant; but assessment of these impacts is usually subsumed within discourse. The point of view is periodically consolidated around multinational corporate core interests. The language is frequently that of marketing and consumption, where the generation of superficial dichotomies, such as the "distinction between theory and practice" has ideological rather than a theoretical value.

The human use of space/time is largely unconscious; it seems to be "hard-wired" but also culturally distinctive. Nonetheless, it is possible to unearth basic frameworks using anthropology, ethnology, philosophy, and linguistics. An interdisciplinary approach is essential. The use of multiple sources is required to build up a complete picture through "polythetic set" (incomplete and intransitive correlations).

use of space and time is "architectural"

Life's most significant "loci" are places were meaning is zero (contradictory, complex, intransitive, self-referential). Such conditions are also characterized by contradictions between reason and experience. "Intransitivity" is the cover term for both the phenomenon and the methodology required to focus on the building-blocks of spatial-temporal perception and architectural comprehension.

poché is our hiding place

Architecture permits direct study of complex phenomena because it is both "non-verbal" and linguistically conditioned; architecture theory serves as a meta theoretical approach to other human sciences because its artificiality is beyond simplistic dyadic categories. Such a phenomenon is poché, where an in-between intransitive state is assigned sometimes with indifference.

is theory necessarily related to practice?

Not justificationalism. Goal of "disinterest." Theory aims at the true; practice aims at the certain. The certain serves culture. The true serves the true.

from the desk of Marco Frascari

Architects should explain their designs only to clients, not to other architects.

What theory is about is sometimes obscure

Context--cultural, phlosophical, historical -- most all is missing from the repertoires of students who no longer read or recognize the names of any classics, don't know history, don't see films except for entertainment, have never read the Bible, don't listen to music other than the most recent productions, and are generally unaware of architecture in any form.

Theory should be aware of popular culture

architecture is meaningful to ordinary people

But, they don't generally know about it at the conscious level. "Place" influence, Lacan's comment about the mind being in the exterior world.

professional architecture tends to be a cult

The proprietariness of the profession has resulted in a shrunken domain. Architects have become irrelevant and exist only though legal requirements and corporate and elite subsidy. Yet the turbulence of the environment (political, social, natural) require architects, or someone like them, more than ever. The metaphor of the architect as a coordinator of a "team of experts" was never apt or true. The architect is one among many who claim ultimate authority over the progress of projects and control of construction.

the "Prince Charles" attitude is wrong, too

Both the professional elite and the "popular elite" err by assuming that architecture is principally about style and the domination of profession over production.

most architecture theory has become art history

Few if any working paradigms that address the essential nature of architecture; "borrowed paradigms" from planning, sociology, art history. The model is cause and effect.

most theory has been driven by moralization

Yet, architecture is curiously dedicated to the rich and powerful; a corporate tool.

buildings from buildings; theories from theories

This is almost tantamount to saying that theory and practice have very little to do with each other; in a sense, this is true. Practice aims at the certain and theory at the true. There is no way to compromise on the search for the truth, just as practice fails when it doesn't make its effects, relations to other buildings, history, and society certain. There is a kind of theory that practitioners use in everyday circumstances, but it should not be held to the same standards as theory in serach of the true. Similarly, theory should be allowed to range whither it may, whatever the implications, because theory, like all research, should be "disinterested."

current ideas of "idea" are mostly wrong

This observation comes from decades of hearing about "ideas" during pin-ups.

architecture "thinks" through "things"

...and it turns bad when it is dominated by concepts.

architecture is celebrity-driven and fashion-driven

Current architecture theory is usually about style, and style is about the distribution of anxiety throughout a professional community. Sick! Sick!

architecture has lost touch with popular mentality

... but has also renounced its main intellectual projects The phenomenon of anti-sophistication. Duh?

main sources are myth, metaphor, topical thinking

Theory must be freed from the point-of-view metaphor. Projects can be speculative (rather than "theoretical"), but not necessarily "architecture."

theory is about the true, architecture the certain

... schools must follow both but the division is not automatically a pedagogy.

projects should range across the true and the certain

Styles of learning are different; this course should accommodate some of those differences.

theory's problem: structure of the imagination

... and its role in constructing and construing architecture.

from audience point of view: architecture is everywhere

threats: reducationism, mysticism, reductionism

(although a little of the latter is necessary).

syncretism is good.

Syncretism = the blending of diverse traditions and cultures; equivalent to "anachronism" in history.