city, the site and the territory, and "sculpture" figures as a way

of defining a new kind of monumentality-a monumentaliry

of th e informe, so to speak, that at once chal!enges the political
co nnotati ons oftht' old mon ument,yet nevertheless preserves a
"notmonumental" ro le for architectu re.
Fol!owing sC\wal decades of selfimposed autonomy, archi
tecture has recently entered a g reatly eKpanded field. Against
neorat ionalism, pure language theory, and postmodern cita
tion fever, architecture-like sculpture some decades earlierhas found new formal and programmatic inspi ration in a host
of di scip lines and technologies. fro m landscape architecture to
di gital animation. Where fo rm e r theoris ts anempted to identify
single and esse ntial bases for a rchitecture , now multiplicity and
plurality are eelebrated, as flows, networks, and maps replace
grids, structures, and history. Where arguments once raged
between Corbusia n and Pal!adian sources, now Henri Bergson
and Gilles Dcleuze are studied fOT their an ti cipation of nonfo r
mal processes. Blobs, swarms, c rystals , and webs proliferate as
pamdigms of buill form, while software has replaced traditional
means of representation with dynamic effect. Nearly two and
a half centuries after Gottfried Lessing inaugurated the search
for mediu m spceifieiry in his LuociJon and more Ihan fifryyears
afte r Greenberg artic ulate d a self refleKive definition of mod
ern painting and sculpture, the boundary Hnes of architecture
remain unresolved.
And yet, under lying the new fo rmal c~per im entation is
a serious atlempt to reconstrue the foundations of the disci
pline, not so much in singular terms but in broader conCeptS
that acknowledge an expanded field, while seeking to over
come the problematic dualisms that have plagued architectu re
for over a century: fo rm and function, historicism and abstrac
tion, utopia and reality, structure and enclosure. Over the last
decade, four new unifying principles hu\e emerged as thc most