Professor of Architecture Todd Gannon’s recently published collection of essays Figments of the Architectural Imagination was a focus of the review article “Beyond Building the Tower of Babel: Critics Catherine Ingraham and Todd Gannon Rethink Architecture” in Architect Magazine. The review by Aaron Betsky investigates the two recent texts’ engagement with the “history and theory of the discipline from our more virtual, more complex, and more technologically defined situation.”

It is two longer essays, both co-authored with the renowned literary critic N. Katherine Hayles, that lead Gannon to make (even) broader theoretical points.

Whereas Ingraham wants us to see that there is no core tradition of buildings that stand independently of either the society in which they appear and operate, or the wider biological and technical systems of which they are part, Gannon and Hayles ask us to understand that we should not try to separate “real” and “virtual” buildings, but rather realize that the physical and its digital version are both “documents” of certain forces architects try to direct.

Read more at Architect Magazine