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In Architecture of Thought , Andrzej Piotrowski maps and conceptually explores material practices of the past, showing how physical artifacts and visual environments manifest culturally rooted modes of thought and participate in the most nuanced processes of negotiations and ideological exchanges. According to Piotrowski, material structures enable people to think in new ways--distill emerging or alter existing worldviews--before words can stabilize them as conventional narratives.
Combining design thinking with academic methods of inquiry, Piotrowski traces ancient to modern architectural histories and--through critical readings of select buildings--examines the role of nonverbal exchanges in the development of an accumulated Western identity. Unlike studies that organize around the traditional scheme of periodization in history, Architecture of Thought uses an interdisciplinary approach to investigate a wide spectrum of cultural productions in different times and places. Operating from the assertion that buildings are the most permanent record of unself-conscious beliefs and attitudes, it discusses Byzantium and the West after iconoclasm, the conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Eastern Europe, the rise of the culture of consumerism in Victorian England, and High Modernism as its consequence. By moving beyond the assumption that historical structures reflect transcendental values and deterministic laws of physics or economy or have been shaped by self-conscious individuals, Piotrowski challenges the traditional knowledge of what architecture is and can be.

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In the introduction, Piotrowski (Univ. of Minnesota) provocatively proposes that architecture is an insufficiently explored cultural practice. In the rest of this volume, he convincingly explains that architecture exceeds normative considerations in terms of problem solving, collective symbolic practice, or mere functional reaction. Indeed, he argues, architecture situates paradoxical approaches for thinking about sociocultural problems. In this way, each site of architecture becomes the means for dynamic discussion about how one thinks through, for example, religious representation in Byzantine architecture, religious syncretism in Mesoamerica, the dynamics of religious domination in the eastern European Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the process of making capitalism comforting in England. Images help direct readers' attention and focus the discussions. This volume challenges one to reassess not only how one thinks about architecture, but also how architecture negotiates the way one understands the world. It will be a means of critically engaging advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate students. L. Banu Purdue University

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Andrzej Piotrowski is associate professor in the School of Architecture, University of Minnesota. He is coeditor of The Discipline of Architecture (Minnesota, 2001).