Preface : Mess Is the Law

Introduction : The Elevator Pitch

I CONTINGENCY 3

1 Deluded Detachment 7

The Paternoster 7

Beaux- Arts Mao 11

2B or Not 2B? 17

Purity Is a Myth 18

2 A Semblance of Order 27

New Labour Vitruvius 27

Rogue Objects 29

Bauman's Order 31

The Ridding of Contingency 35

Counting Sheep 41

3 Coping with Contingency 45

A Balance of Colossal Forces 45

The Juggernaut 48

Rorty's Retreat 51

Walking the Girder 54

Situated Knowledge 55

II TIME, SPACE, AND LO- FI ARCHITECTURE 63

4 Time of Waste 67

Waste in Transit 67

Rubbish Theory 70

Time and Waste 73

5 Out of Time 77

The Terror of Time 77

From Eternity to Here 80

Here and Now 84

Tampering with Time 89

6 In Time 93

Le Temps 93

Thick Time 95

Dirty Old Time 100

The Unfinished 104

Drawing Time 109

From Noun to Verb 116

7 Slack Space 117

Making Space 117

Hard Space 119

Social Space 125

Inauthentic Space 127

Slack Space 133

8 Lo- Fi Architecture 135

Elvis Lives 135

Exploding into Reality 137

Monstrous Hybrids 143

How They'll Tell if Your Building Is Gay 146

III ARCHITECTURE : A DEPENDENT PROFESSION 149

9 Architectural Agency 153

Lost in Action 153

Self- Control 156

Left Brain, Right Brain 159

Remember I'm the Bloody Architect 161

The Crucible 163

The Problem of the Problem 166

Letting Go 169

10 Imperfect Ethics 171

Bad Ethics 171

Phony Ethics 174

Social Scales 178

Codes of Misconduct 179

The Ethics of Responsibility 184

11 Hope against Hope 189

Gymnasts in the Prison Yard 189

The Flight to Utopia 190

Formative Contexts 191

Angels with Dirty Faces 194

Acknowledgments 197

Notes 201

Bibliography 239

Figure Credits 247

Index