Philosophy exercises a massive influence on contemporary architectural
culture and the understanding of the built environment.
Discussions of architects and architectural academics are heavily loaded
with theoretical ideas, concepts and views imported from the works of
philosophers. At the same time this architectural employment of
philosophy rarely goes beyond the tendency to mine philosophical works
for ideas, words and phrases and use them, often without much
understanding, in order to promote architectural agendas and embellish
theoretical claims made by architects and academics.
The book presents the history of this phenomenon for the past hundred
years. It describes and analyzes numerous, often funny, entertaining as
well as embarrassing, examples of false intellectual pretense and
pompous but incompetent philosophical posturing by prominent architects
and architectural academics of the era and their efforts to bamboozle
readers, colleagues and the general public. The book presents a powerful
criticism of modernist views on architecture and argues that the rise of
obfuscation and philosophical posturing among architects and
architectural academics is a defensive strategy intended to draw
attention away from the failure of Modernism in architecture.
