Jorge Otero-Pailos, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia University, has written a history of "architectural phenomenology," a movement loosely related to philosophical phenomenology that surreptitiously controlled postmodernism's "turn to history." The book employs a novel "polygraphic" method, reconstructing its subject from disparate fragments. It is divided in four chapters respectively devoted to Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. What motivated the book was a personal disappointment with the subject and the realization of its negative influence on architectural "intellectuality." The author does, however, give the movement credit for its general improvement of architectural historiography.
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