St. Colin Rowe and The Architecture Theory Wars (original) (raw)

2000, Bulletin of Science, Technology, & Society

Although it is largely unnoticed in the outside world, a multi-factional theory war has been raging for some time within the architectural community over the very nature, purpose, and meaning of architecture and the city. The context of these battles is, of course, late modernity. Our globally expanding media and advertising saturated culture, with its increasingly specialized division of labor, immoderate habits of litigation, and explosion of technological gadgetry, poses significant challenges to the historically generalist and slow-to-change practice of architecture. It is hard for architects to make themselves heard these days, and for many years now architects have had to compete not only for jobs, but to justify architecture itself. This surely accounts not only for the recent explosion of architectural theory, but also for the ferocity of the factions in the theory wars. For well more than thirty years now partisans of architectural modernism, functionalism, structural expressionism, sustainability, neo-rationalism, post-modernism, contextualism, Manhattanism, neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism, critical theory, and deconstructivism all have been vying to stake out architecture's turf in a culture increasingly indifferent to architecture conceived as anything other than commercial advertisement, and the city as anything other than an entertainment zone.