Gathering twenty essays written over twenty years, Figments of the Architectural Imagination explores the frontiers of speculative architectural design, theory, and pedagogy to offer clear-eyed and incisive treatments of some of the most important projects, practices, and polemics at work making contemporary architecture contemporary. These sharp and insightful texts, whether addressing the impact of digital technology, the design of an effective hotel, the emergence of the Los Angeles vanguard, or the proper execution of a thesis project, combine frontline reportage, archival scholarship, trenchant prose, and impressive critical acumen to cut through the cacophony of recent architectural discourse with uncommon clarity, intelligence, rigor, and wit. Taken together, these essays provide essential orientation for practitioners, academics, students, and aficionados hoping to understand how contemporary architecture came to be where it is and to speculate on where it might go next.

Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech reassesses one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history through a detailed examination of Banham's writing on High Tech architecture and its immediate antecedents. Taking as a guide Banham's habit of structuring his writings around dialectical tensions, Todd Gannon sheds new light on Banham's early engagement with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, his measured enthusiasm for the "clip-on" approach developed by Cedric Price and the Archigram group, his advocacy of "well- tempered environments" fostered by integrated mechanical and electrical systems, and his late- career assessments of High Tech practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano.Gannon devotes significant attention to Banham'slate work, including fresh archival materialsrelated to Making Architecture: The Paradoxes ofHigh Tech, the manu-script he left unfinished athis death in 1988. For the first time, readers will have access to Banham's previously unpublished draft introduction to that book.