Many commentators over the past couple decades have enthusiastically heralded the arrival of a “postcritical” age in art and architecture. Gone is the imperative to question the existing state of affairs, particularly in the latter field, where it is dismissed as inimical to the practice of building. Criticism is considered gloomy and elitist, even superfluous. Under the influence of theorists like Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Jacques Rancière, and their epigones in the architectural academe, practitioners have learned to embrace the world as it is.

Douglas Spencer’s Critique of Architecture confronts this trend head on. Opposed to the prevailing postcritical mood, the essays seek to ascertain architecture’s role in the capitalist mode of production as presently configured. In that sense, the book shares elements with its predecessor, The Architecture of Neoliberalism (2016). With both projects, Spencer hopes to rehabilitate a critical orientation toward the discipline; this orientation, moreover, has an explicitly Marxist bent. “After a now decades-long period of assault on critical theory,” he writes, “discussions of class, labor, and capital sit uneasily within what currently passes for theoretical discourse.”1

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• 1. Critique of Architecture opens with a blistering polemic, first published in 2012, against what Spencer calls “architectural Deleuzism.” For him, it refers to architects’ widespread appropriation of concepts from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (along with his collaborator, Félix Guattari) starting in the late ’90s. Buzzwords such as “the fold” and “smooth space” began to appear in architecture journals, lifted straight from the pages of A Thousand Plateaus and Leibniz and the Baroque. Unlike the old semiotic paradigm it displaced, from postmodern playfulness to Derrida-inspired deconstructivism, Deleuze’s various figures of thought were felt to be eminently translatable to design. Even further, by mere dint of its philosophical derivation, any building that invoked these concepts (cf. the works of Patrik Schumacher and Alejandro Zaera-Polo) was seen to possess a halo of radicalism. To Spencer, however, the Deleuzist dispensation in architecture belied a very real complicity with the prerogatives of neoliberal capitalism.