Architectural Principles in the Age of Fraud

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.

Branko Mitrović received his PhDs both in Architecture and Philosophy, and he works and publishes in both fields. He is employed as the professor of architectural history and theory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. He is the author (or co-author) of eight other books and has been the recipient of the Humboldt Research Award.