Catherine Ingraham

Architecture's Theory is about what architecture makes of theory and what theory makes of architecture. The task for architectural theorists in any epoch, Ingraham argues, is to unearth prevailing architectural ideas and practices in order to rethink them in relation to contemporary contexts : ideas and practices such as the vicissitudes of architectural forms (placid, charismatic, monstrous) ; architectural techniques and apparatuses ; aspects of precedents—modernist, postmodernist, digital.
The book poses questions about the status of nature and reframes architectural design as a form of figural play that incorporates the coolness of judgment. The concept of ordering also threads through these essays, since ordering both creates and manages calculability, narratives, ornamentation, power, representation, structures, walls, and windows. Ingraham maintains that without theory, nascent or active, there can be no architecture.