It was Vasari who, in the 16th century, accustomed us to reading the history of architecture through the careers of great artists—exceptional figures whose talent elevated various art forms to the superior state we still recognize today by Vasari’s own term: the Renaissance. It is not difficult to identify in this the seeds of a way of writing history—and, by extension, of understanding the very tradition of architecture—based on so-called "masters," figures whose oeuvre defines the range of possibilities within an institutionalized system of knowledge we commonly call a "discipline."
This remained the case until the late nineties, when Giorgio Agamben revived the idea of the "state of exception" that Carl Schmitt had proposed in 1922. By pointing to the concentration camp as the archetype that best represents this notion, Agamben established an architectural image of the state of exception, as he localized and defined an order for this concept. Nearly a decade later, we as architects began to question these spaces, a period in which we have also become aware that, however neutral the thinking behind a project may be, its effects are always political.
