The Death and Life of Theory

Abstract

This essay challenges a contemporary understanding of theory, largely through the assertion that architecture becomes servile when only read theoretically. It explains some of the conceptions involved in the editing of the long-running journal AA Files, among them the preferential treatment this publication gives to history, and makes a more fundamental argument that architecture does not need the appliqué of philosophy because multiple ideas and allusions are already embedded within it. Nevertheless, it recognises that among all of architecture’s various objects is theory itself. Following Alberti’s distinction between theory and practice it argues that any form of architectural production not in the form of building is therefore by definition a theory.