Latour for Architects

The UK publisher Routledge offers a series titled “Thinkers for Architects” that is edited by Adam Sharr, Professor of Architecture at Newcastle University. Past books have focused on the work of Henri Lefebvre, Sigmund Freud, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others; all non-architects. The most recent addition – an outstanding choice – is Bruno Latour, the French philosopher, the most famous of the actor-network theorists (ANT), and a central figure in science and technology studies. The motivation for the series is that architecture needs an infusion of theory from outside the discipline because home-grown ideas are seemingly insufficient for the design inspiration that architecture demands. Any author writing in the series faces three tasks: justifying the relevance of the featured thinker; explaining the body of work to those unfamiliar with it; and demonstrating the work’s applicability. While doing so, the author must serve two masters – the thinker and the discipline – both of whom are greedy for textual space. Too much thinker and the discipline is pushed off-stage; too much disciplinary application and the thinker’s ideas fail to resonate. The most obvious approach, as occurs here in Latour for Architects, is to Robert A. Beauregard is Professor Emeritus in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University (USA) rab48@columbia.edu © 2022 Robert A. Beauregard DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2022.2136902