Ambiguously Contingent / The Folly as Both Subject and Object

Is it folly to conceive of an architecture without contingency? Definably, theword contingent is used to describe something that only happens following aprior requisite occurrence; therefore contingency immediately establishes animplicit hierarchy, suggesting the first thing informs the second. This chickenand egg dilemma of something needing to come before something else hascontinually fueled architectural debate over which is in fact the subject andwhich is the object; the building as a thing or the site as another thing.1

Volume Editors
Julie Larsen & Roger Hubeli