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skin is "stretched too thin, as if [its] skin represented an unsuccessful effort to impose a unity on [its] various parts." As a conducting and monstrous body this book consists of what Lyotard calls "miscellaneous pieces, each being of a variable format and belonging to its own time, begun and finished with it."3 This assemblage wants to celebrate the critical connections between diverging architectural positions while simultaneously respecting the sublime gulfs that construct each of these positions as separate and different. This notion of assemblage is similar to Michel Foucault's notion of an apparatus. For Foucault, an apparatus is a "thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions - in short, the said as much as the unsaid....The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements."4 

This assemblage of heterogenous parts attempts to explore the multiple directions operating within the present architectural crisis without privileging any one position or direction. Here, work by such artists as Dennis Adams, Alice Aycock, Mary Miss and Dan Graham work to further destabilize the ground upon which architecture attempts to delineate its disciplinary identity. Jennifer Bloomer, an architect/theoretician and Anna Bergren, a professor of classics, continue their respective projects of calling the relationship between architecture and gender into question. Bloomer discusses this relationship in terms of desire while Bergren examines this connection through an understanding of the Greek notion of metis. Marco Frascari, an architect/theoretician attempts to challenge the relationship between architecture's self assurance with regard to instrumental reason through a notion of techne that includes the mysterious and poetic element of wonder. Diane Ghirardo, an architectural historian/theoretician, and Ferruccio Trabalzi, a sociologist, continue to open architectural discourse to the issues and operations of what they call "social criticism." Ghirardo's essay examines the controversy surrounding Aldo Rossi's Monument to Sandro Pertini in Milan, Italy. Trabalzi, while proposing an alternative, urban itinerary for the city of Rome, examines the recent cultural violence surrounding the ex-Pantanella. Mark Linder, an architect/theoretician, examines notions of an "alternative" architecture as generated through his reading of Emersonian pragmatism. Peter Eisenman, an architect/theoretician, further develops the relationship between architecture and the event. This national and scholarly work is then juxtaposed with, and hopefully frustrated by, such "southern" artists as Beverly Buchanan, Robert Cheatham, Pat Potter, Terrell James and by such "southern" writers, poets, and playwrights as Pearl Cleage and Jim Grimsley. Along with its inclusive and interdisciplinary character, this project simultaneously sets out to explore how the present architectural crisis is related to what is often considered such monstrously theoretical possibilities as phenomenology, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, feminism, pragmatism and critical theory. The intention of this work is not to persuade a reader to choose any one position over another - nor is it meant as a guidebook to contemporary architectural theory. Instead, this text wants to transport the reader into the eye of this architectural/theoretical hurricane.