Interpreting Basic Buildings. Curatorship, introduction and critical glossary by Nicola Marzot

The volume codifies the method to read building structures that have appeared in the past as 'spontaneous consciousness' level in a progression of scalar sizes ranging from buildings and clusters of buildings to urban organisms and the territory. 'Process classification' is the key to use history in working as architects in the modern world. We wish to extract the laws of behaviour, formation and mutation of manmade structuring on the various scales of man's work as we consider this knowledge to be the only possible solution to the architectural crisis that has dragged on for over two centuries. It results in planning based on reviving the tradition of 'producing' buildings not as a dogmatic adaptation to past building methods but intended to contemporaneously fit our work into the continuity of laws and behaviour codified in our cultural area; these laws can only be understood and used as an effective reference system by carefully reading our built environment.