Crib Sheets: Notes on Contemporary Architectural Conversation

Architectural discourse today is characterized by an overlapping conversation between architects and academics, teachers and students, theorists and practitioners. Certain terms — “diagram, ” “extreme form, ” “autonomy, ” and “the generic, ” among others — capture the moment in architecture in definition and in operation. Crib Sheets is a guide — a “crib” — to twenty-two of those buzzwords, framing contemporary currents and trajectories. Each of the words is presented with a list of quotations, or sound bites, arranged in order of length and drawn from more than two hundred commentators, from Charles Baudelaire, Le Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller to Frank Gehry, Paul Goldberger, and Rem Koolhaas. The structure attempts to evoke the present-day architectural conversation, capturing social milieus, current events, clusters of topics, and even background noise and eavesdropping.