Everything is OK

The conflict between Toward an Urban Landscape and the other two writings, Hybrid Morphologies and Representation and Landscape lies primarily in it’s fundamental convictions of what architecture is and what it should respond to, either through a design process or as a methodology for analysis. The relationship of Heidegger, Deluze and Guatari, and other philosophy that it is so fashionable to use as inspiration for architecture, would seem to be unimportant to Frampton in Toward an Urban Landscape. He suggests that political and economic structures are defining the urban landscape while architects discuss irrelevant ideology. In fact, Frampton would suggest that it is imperative that we disregard such ideology.

These essays would seem to embody opposing ends of an ideological spectrum, but there is some commonality to the set. Similar to the overlap suggested in Hybrid Morphologies, there is space in the milieu of architectural discourse for an ideological hybrid. This hybrid is also hinted at in Representation and Landscape, which suggests a place that allows for dealing with both the material realities of design and the abstractions of drawing and philosophy. Corner concedes that even though the drawing is disconnected from constructed space, it is necessary as a place to incubate and experiment with ideas. Similarly, the politics and economies of the built environment from Frampton can be seen as the built reality and the ideology of other texts as the abstraction. Ultimately, they should inform one another.