For more than three decades—probably resulting from the globalization that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—historians and critics have identified various new threads of architectural exploration. Such proliferation of interpretations has given rise to a scene so complex that it is almost impossible to comprehend the large number of trends and projects that abound—we are witnessing an incessant competition to find an ever-greater, singular, spectacular, and instantly recognizable expression. There has been widespread recourse to philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, environmental sciences, mediated communication, and the Internet, just to name a few of the themes that have preoccupied architects.

But architecture is the physical manifestation of living—it is a constellation of individual and collective memories, different representations of communities, and positive tensions between various historical periods, all realized in form and space. Design­ers have become more concerned with what is around buildings than with the ways of thinking about architecture and making it concrete. The history of architecture is passed over, if not entirely excluded, which can be attributed to a constant expansion of architecture’s own disciplinary boundaries, the increasing marginalization of the art of composition, and the dissolution of the very reason for building—that is, its true essence and purpose. In front of historians and critics today is a radical neo-functionalism comprising technologies of extraordinary potential, a total dependence on digital design systems, and the pervasive presence of fads in the media. The intellectual values of architecture, which introduced us to the higher sphere of the spirit, no longer exist.