The book argues for a shift of orientation in architectural thought, from what the building is to what it does; it also shows that the workings or the reality of the individual work (the room, building, garden, or landscape) cannot be understood apart its wider milieu, the environment in which it finds orientation. We tend to think of buildings as rather static or inert objects;buildings win praise for their stability. What's more, we also tend to assume each building is a discrete work that can be fully explained by the intentions of its designer and the techniques of its builders. These accounts aren't wrong, just partial. An important argument of this book is that conception and construction only explain the work's pre-history, not its manner of existing in the world, its ways of variously resisting and allowing the impress or effect of the forces that animate the wider location.

Table of contents:

Orientation otherwise

Performances

Breathing walls

Unscripted performances

Materials matter

Roughness

Situations

Table talk

Sitting in the city

Practically primitive

Topographies

Skylines

Landings and crossings

Space in and out of architecture

Law of meander.