An architect friend of mine is obsessed with James Wines, which was reason enough for me to find De-Architecture. I love recommendations that come with that level of enthusiasm. Someone else’s obsession can be an incredible way into a subject.
Published in 1987, Wines’s book questions what architecture is allowed to be and argues for inclusion, inversion, indeterminacy, and chance. I particularly like the idea of beginning with the rules of a discipline and then asking which ones might need to disappear. What do we discover when we stop accepting the definition we were given?
