Functionalism today / Theodor W. Adorno -- Architecture ; Slaughterhouse ; Museum / Georges Bataille -- On some motifs in Baudelaire ; Paris, capital of the nineteenth century / Walter Benjamin -- Formative education, engineering form, ornament / Ernst Bloch -- The hotel lobby ; On employment agencies ; the construction of a space / Siegfried Kracauer -- Bridge and door ; The metropolis and mental life / Georg Simmel -- Poetics of space (extract) / Gaston Bachelard -- Building, dwelling, thinking ; ... Poetically man dwells ... ; The origin of the work of art (extracts) ; Art and space / Martin Heidegger -- The ontological foundation of the occasional and the decorative / Hans-Georg Gadamer -- The production of space (extracts) / Henri Lefebvre -- The end of modernity, the end of the project? ; Ornament/monument / Gianni Vattimo -- Semiology and the urban ; The Eiffel Tower / Roland Barthes -- Function and sign : the semiotics of architecture ; How an exposition exposes itself / Umberto Eco -- The Beaubourg-effect : implosion and deterrence ; America / Jean Baudrillard -- Modern and postmodern architecture / Jürgen Habermas -- The cultural logic of late capitalism ; The constraints of postmodernism (extract) ; Is space political? / Fredric Jameson -- Domus and the megalopolis / Jean-François Lyotard -- Aisenmann and the housing of tradition / Andrew Benjamin -- Attacks of the castle / Hélène Cixous -- Postscript on the societies of control ; City/state (with Félix Guattari) / Gilles Deleuze -- Architecture where the desire may live (interview) ; Point de folie : maintenant l'architecture ; Why Peter Eisenman writes such good books / Jacques Derrida -- Of other spaces : Utopias and Heterotopias ; Panopticism (extract) ; Space, knowledge and power (interview conducted with Paul Rabinow) / Michel Foucault -- The overexposed city / Paul Virilio.

Rethinking Architecture offers a refreshing take on the statement of architecture -- what we mean by what we build. Brought together for the first time, this collection of core writings on architecture by many of the key philosophers and cultural theorists of the twentieth century reconsiders many of the accepted tenets of architectural theory from a broader cultural perspective. Rethinking Architecture represents a careful selection of the very best theoretical writings on the ideas which have shaped our cities and our experiences around architecture. Neil Leach lays out five sections composing the predominant schools of twentieth century thought. Sectional introductions link important ideas and themes, and surveys of the lives and works of each theorist preface their writings."--Publisher's information.