As I argue in Architecture in its Continuums, the constants of architecture have been much described: forms disposed in space revealed by light; solids and cavities composed of matter that is carved, moulded, componentized or pixelated, surfaced to look hard, soft or translucent, textured or decorated, coloured raw or applied, penetrated with openings and articulated with markings that are rhythmically and proportionally arrayed; elements deployed to create a range of aural resonances; materials composed with their scented impact on the olfactory system in mind. The continuums in which architecture operates are less well documented and for the most part they have been disrupted. The basis of knowing and doing has been obscured from architects and their clients by the failure to understand that spatial thinking is the unique knowledge base of the profession. The range of expertise available to architects has been constricted by the political distancing of the profession from what are regarded, wrongly in my view, as subaltern disciplines: landscape architecture, interior design and decorating, and building design. Scholarship in the field has been bedevilled by a separation between practice and research, while the ethics of practice have been distorted by the grandiose overstatements of modernism or marginalized by the largely aesthetic concerns of postmodernism.
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