1.

We have recently learned that from 1 April 2027 (a date, it will be noted, not devoid of sour irony), the theory chair at TU Berlin will not be renewed.1 Architectural theory, as a discipline with its own institutional representation, will disappear from the largest faculty of architecture in the German capital. The reasons given, of course, are contingent, supposedly unassailable decisions stemming from what society has determined to be the greater good. In 2025 alone, Berlin’s universities were required to absorb cuts of approximately 140 million euro.2 Humboldt-Universität has been experiencing a hiring restriction since 1 April 2026. Its Faculty Council agreed to discontinue the Institute of Archaeology in its current form, which will happen over the next four to five years.3 The institution survived the tragedies of the twentieth century, the Berlin Wall, and the reunification of the city. It may succumb to austerity. In the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering at Wuppertal, as many as six professorial chairs are due to be eliminated.4 At first, the administration planned to allow eight faculty vacancies to remain unfilled for the next eight to ten years, which, in practice, would have meant the closure of the Department of Architecture (something prevented only by protests from staff and students).5 In Hesse, state universities estimate that the funding program for 2026–2031 will leave them with a cumulative deficit of approximately one billion euros over six years.6

Yet more signs of the sad times we live in: the economy leaves no room for culture. Now, this short essay does not set out to assess the merits of specific budgetary decisions, nor to discuss the strategic validity of investments whose motivations are, at least in part, self-evident. What can be done, what a text of this sort can do (written by someone who is neither a German citizen nor one of its residents) is to reflect on the consequences, and perhaps on the deeper reasons behind what is happening, if only because the phenomenon is not solely German: it is European, even Western. In Italy, France, Austria, the United States, culture has long been subjected to cuts of a similar kind. Of course, some disciplines resist: those that produce immediate practical applications. As we know, in times of crisis one must put food on the table; there is no time for philosophizing. And what are the humanities and the arts, at least from this perspective, if not pastimes for people with nothing important to do? Worse still: what are the humanities and the arts if not activities with the disagreeable habit of producing critical thought, that is, a questioning of the existing order? All this is becoming less tolerable by the day for a Western culture increasingly impatient with its own contradictions and dissent (which are, after all, its main sources of beauty).

And then, among all the humanities, what exactly is architectural theory? Just another intellectual game, one might say; and in any case a game reserved for a very small circle of aficionados, within a practice that often claims to have no need for it. To build, it is argued, one need only continue doing what is already being done. All one needs to know is how to reproduce those exquisitely ‘sustainable’ buildings now ubiquitous in European cities; those generally decorated with green panels, fake brickwork, and gold-coloured window frames.

2.

“The country my mother left behind was a country she believed in; a country we kept alive till her last breath; a country that never existed in that form; a country that, in my memory, I will always associate with my mother”:7 so Alex says at the end of Good Bye, Lenin!, a cult movie of early twenty-first-century European cinema. A moving film whose strength lies in the tragicomic construction of an unreal world; a world sustained by a son’s love for his mother; a world that never really existed in that form; a world one has to believe in to make one’s own time bearable. It is all too easy to paraphrase: Good Bye, Theory! What is theory, today, if not something comfortable and endearing? At best, a comforting cuddle for thought in a world where architecture seems no longer concerned with anything beyond practical business.

And it is no coincidence that many of us, interested in theory, feel nostalgic for a time we never lived through, looking back to an era when architecture aspired to be a cultural discipline as well as a technical one, a discourse as well as a service, and when theoretical reflection was an integral part of the architect’s job. It is all too easy for those who write to feel nostalgic for a time when the books of theorists and historians seemed to carry real weight in architecture (one need only think of the usual giants, still being rediscovered in what seems a perpetual round of conferences and publications—and surely not by chance: Reyner Banham, Colin Rowe, Manfredo Tafuri, etc.). It is hard not to feel nostalgic for a world in which practicing architects wrote; for a time when architects also reflected on their practice in theoretical terms; a time when an architect such as Aldo Rossi, one of the most commercially successful of his generation, invested his best energies in theoretical research. Feeling nostalgic for all this, for an era when design and theory seemed genuinely interested in one another, is almost natural (a brief digression, only seemingly off topic: academia has long been criticized for being too removed from the practical demands of the profession; perhaps it would be more accurate to reverse the charge, and direct it at a profession that is no longer interested in questioning itself).

There is nostalgia, then; and with it the suspicion that such a time was never quite what we imagine, much like the Berlin of Wolfgang Becker’s film, all the more moving for being romanticized: “the GDR that I created for my mother increasingly became the GDR that I myself might have wished for.”8 But this does not mean that such a time did not exist, in some form or another, together with many other things that nostalgia tends to forget. The point is not to establish how beautiful the past was (which it was not: this applies obviously to any form of dictatorship, but also to twentieth-century architectural culture, which was Western-centric, deeply gendered, and even more elitist than today). The point is this: beautiful or ugly, real or imagined, romanticized or repressed, something resembling what we imagine existed no longer exists.

Undoubtedly, influential theorists still exist today, just as there are designers who write, magazines and writers in general (perhaps there have never been so many of us, which is precisely the other side of the coin: an increase in production inversely proportional to our possibility of making an impact). But the prevailing sense is that we have moved from a world in which architectural culture was recognized as a value, to something quite different. At one level, rigid academic protocols. At another, an increasingly individualist culture (Who actually reads all these articles and journal issues?). There was a time when magazines debated theory and design; today, we watch reels on TikTok and Instagram.

Some will object, of course, that this is simply another case of nostalgia, an idealization of a world that never existed as such. One need only think of print culture, which raised debate, but also decided who could be published and who could not, acting as both editor and gatekeeper; as it is true that some ‘reels’, a few, are actually good.   So, yes, it may be conceded: a form of nostalgia. But the difference between a world in which culture was a material good, one that could improve social conditions, and a world in which we are compelled to perform incessantly, is plain to see: rather than producing knowledge and critical inquiry, we must produce images of ourselves, in pursuit of yet another short-term contract for a so-called career, ‘so-called’ because almost no one can afford a pension plan.

Perhaps one fact sums all of this up: in 1967, Oswald Mathias Ungers organized a conference in Berlin on the state of architectural theory. In 1999, it was repeated. This year, in 2026, the conference was commemorated (and it had to be now, because in 2027 the chair that might have hosted the event will no longer exist). The original conference and its last commemoration are nearly six decades apart. Ungers’ question was left open, but rather than making room for new answers, the decision was made to foreclose them. Which raises an unavoidable question: what happened?

3.

At the end of the 1970s, in the much-cited but less-read The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard described a transition from a form of knowledge legitimized by what he famously called grands récits (grand emancipatory narratives) to two other modes. On the one hand, what he called postmodern science, speculative and paralogical (that is, a deductive science connected to theories of relativity, quantum physics, and theories of complexity). On the other hand, a form of knowledge he defined as performativist, “based on its optimizing the system’s performance—efficiency”,9 that is, a form of knowledge that legitimizes itself by means of measurable outcomes, not unlike the performance of a machine.

Over the years, this second option has only gained strength, to the point of transforming Lyotard’s diagnosis into the recognition that we are living with a chronic condition, marked by recurrent acute exacerbations: a culture increasingly uninterested in its own reasons, and which seems to ask only the following questions: ‘what is this for?’ ‘What do I produce?’ ‘What do we gain?’

When a Faculty chooses to dismiss theory, it demonstrates its active role in all of this, no matter how practical or contingent the reasons given may have been (or, perhaps, this is precisely its most evident symptom). In the regime of performativism, theory does not produce quantifiable results. It does not generate any new patents, nor does it attract industrial funding. Its output cannot be judged by positivist or performative criteria, the kind of metrics that even university institutions are increasingly adopting, evidently becoming less and less keen to invest in basic research.

In a university reduced to a performative machine (with its ranking systems and impact metrics), theory is, literally, non-performing. And what does not perform is eliminated: “research sectors that are unable to argue that they contribute even indirectly to the optimization of the system’s performance are abandoned by the flow of capital and doomed to senescence.”10 All this system needs is what Isabelle Stengers has, in turn, defined as fast science: a science populated by “large numbers of hard-working scientists, producing facts at the speed made possible by ever more sophisticated instrumentation,” while the production and interpretation of those facts ultimately “confirm the landscape of established interests.”11 Chasing objectives, following methods, meeting predefined metrics is its mantra.

All of this, for us, presupposes a conception of architecture as mere service, as if its only task were to fit volumes. An architecture, in short, that is itself performative, defined by the execution of tasks, and the pragmatic response to questions others have already formulated; an architecture that quite simply has no need for theory, enthusiastically adapted to serving the interests of real estate.

Here we are: architecture is increasingly judged by strictly technical criteria (and the very fact that many universities have long funded research oriented solely in this direction is itself an eloquent sign of the longer history that has, year after year, prepared the ground for theory’s elimination). In this regime of legitimization, a project is considered correct to the extent that it proves capable of performing within the current technical and economic system; and since ‘reality’, the only possible world, provides the project with its field of action, architecture must adhere to it. All that architecture should aspire to is to be ‘more royalist than the king’, as the saying goes: the most banal realism.

4.

Good Bye, theory! The bleakest realism does not need you. Capital does not need you. It has no need to ask itself what it is doing while it does it. Or, at least, that is what some would like to believe, because one fact remains: whether they like it or not, theory is one of the constitutive qualities of architecture. As Gleiter wrote in 2008: “architectural theory is the medium of reflection on architecture as something made and in the process of being made, as well as on its cultural function within a dynamically changing cultural field of forces.”12 Medium of reflection: theory is architecture’s anamnesis; or, one might add, it is architecture’s own medium of self-reflection, that which enables a building, a project, a drawing, or a model to articulate a worldview, a specific way of organizing space rather than another—one that reflects particular conceptions of social relations and politics, if not an entire cosmology. In this sense, theory is coextensive with architecture itself. A theory chair is the place where all of this becomes visible, analyzed, studied, and critically examined. Abolishing the chair does not abolish theory; it abolishes awareness of its presence, which is perhaps even worse, because it also deprives students, researchers, and architects alike, of a space dedicated to questioning.

Which is all the more serious, because theory is nothing other than the means by which architecture has articulated itself as a project, in relation to the ever-changing ways in which a society organizes its forms, materials, symbols, and spaces. As the institute’s mission statement claims, quoting Kant: “what does it mean to orient oneself in thought?”13 Theory is, or has been, the compass of the project, the instrument that prevents design from collapsing into execution. Or better: it has been so at least since Vitruvius declared that the architect must be a cultivated man (a declaration so old that one might have expected it to be beyond dispute). For this reason, it is not only evidently wrong to close departments of theory and history, but also stunning (in the sense that it leaves us stunned, without orientation), for it is precisely history and theory that make it possible to rethink the very reality we live in. It is history that makes it possible to construct a genealogy of the present; it is theory that makes it possible to imagine another world and to exercise critique. They are the foundation of any project that aspires to be more than a provision of service, or a matter of ‘craft’.

Of course, a minimum dose of self-criticism is also necessary. Those of us who have taken an interest in it know perfectly well that theory has often succumbed to the very logic of performativism it often claims to criticize (just as it is worth stressing that performativism should not be confused with technique—or, more precisely, with technology—which in many cases constitutes a genuinely critical and speculative field of research). We have all witnessed and somewhat taken part in the proliferation of articles written in that peculiar vernacular of peer review, and we have seen the repetition of “tautological maxims of contemporary culture”,14 to use (and betray) Anna Kornbluh’s words: the academic repetition of spent categories to satisfy the requirements of institutional audit, exactly as architecture without theory performs within the system of the real estate market. We have also seen how easily that very paralogy so dear to Lyotard (“having the capacity to modify the rules of [the] game”15) became its opposite. In his hands, it was quite an unsettling enterprise. He and others could play with language because they had first understood what the language was doing before they interfered with it. Some can mint concepts because they survey and estrange the territories those concepts would be required to traverse. “Sense”, as Jean-Luc Nancy affirmed, “is before us like a night into which we must enter with eyes wide open.”16 But even the night, entered often enough, or too quickly, becomes familiar; and what begins as a foray into darkness turns into a journey through neon-lit signs. Paralogy easily becomes the production of a fashionable idiom, itself performative in exactly the way some of its practitioners would least like to acknowledge: a form of criticality valued for the immunity it confers.

Theory, in short, has sometimes been used as a language answerable only to itself: more preoccupied with the open-access status of a paper than with whether the paper contains an idea; more attentive to reproducing the intellectual fashion of the moment than to the elementary courtesy of dialogue, or the basic need of debate. It too has undergone performativist turns, the only difference being that it has never quite managed to compete on equal terms with those who sell products.

And yet, none of this takes anything away from what theory can do (never ‘should’), which is what it does at its best: placing a critical and speculative space between us and things. It opens a space of thought, a critical distance without which things appear as unchangeable givens and we appear to ourselves as mere executors. The speculative and critical force of theory is not an intellectual luxury to be sacrificed in the name of a budget cut. It is the most elementary form of resistance to the blind spots of the present. It is what allows “the world [to become] once again infinite to us,”17 in Friedrich Nietzsche’s classic wording: reality seen as a critical space for interpretation and speculation.

To put it in terms more suited to those who make budget cuts: before optimizing reality, before making what we do more efficient, it might be worth pausing to ask what it is we are doing, and why. We might question the ends and the logics that decide in advance what is possible and what seems impossible. Theory is (and has always been) the instrument to do so. It allows us to understand that there might have been a different route to what to do, another choice; and that, if one choice was made, another could have been made. When a university closes a department of theory, it is not closing an unproductive division, whatever ‘unproductive’ may mean. It reveals that it has lost its orientation, that it has lost the possibility of imagining a compass. It knows what it is doing; it may even do it well, but it can no longer think about where else it could have gone, which is the same thing as being unable to ask where it might go.

5.

Good bye, theory? If we continue down the road of performativism (and there are no signs of a change of direction), the answer can only be affirmative: a department closed here, a chair not renewed there, a budget cut at one university and contracts canceled at another. Theory does nothing but shrink, losing ground within the institutional representation of architecture. There seems to be no good news on the horizon, unless one counts the proverbial reconstruction that is supposed to follow destruction.

At best, we can take a hollow consolation: even in the definitive triumph of the bleakest realism, theory will persist. This much is certain: as long as there is someone unsatisfied with merely knowing how and what to build, and wanting to understand why or what else, some form of architectural theory will continue to exist. The impulse is older than the discipline, and it will survive the discipline if it has to.

But one question remains: how can something exist without an institutional space? How can a discipline survive without a place in which to be taught, without an audience? It is difficult to say. It may well be that theory, as an autonomous discipline, will simply disappear (it is, after all, a relatively recent invention, and it does not exist everywhere).18 It may be that one crisis after another will consume all the resources allocated to the humanities and the arts.

Maybe theory will take other forms; and this is already happening: in the work of collectives, exhibitions, archives, in new modes of communication, in artistic practices, and in formats that faculty boards struggle to categorize, which may itself be a sign of their vitality. Perhaps it will no longer even be called theory; it will have to find new names and new forms, as it has done before, even as it continues to serve the purpose of placing a space between ourselves and what we do, so that we may see it from a different angle.  That much, at least, theory can do for itself, with us, independently of everything except the willingness to think. Whether it will be enough is another matter, and one that only the future will tell. Prognosis requires a vantage point we do not have. We are here, at the closing of a door that may or may not be opened again, in possession of no certainties, while we witness to a diminishing number of chairs and contracts. For now, with whatever mixture of nostalgia and anticipation the occasion demands, for one last time: dear theory, goodbye!