It is difficult to decide whether this seminar is timely or untimely. It is in fact a seminar that I gave in this school almost continuously for some twenty years before deciding that it had perhaps outlived its usefulness. Last semester it was given again with great success and on the strength of this we have decided to offer it again in a slightly different form.
The most significant change is to apply the comparative analytical method to buildings of a more recent date than had been my practice in the past. From this point of view finding appropriate pairs of buildings to compare has not been easy particularly given the transformed nature of architecture in our time. While the level of architectural practice today is surely higher, world-wide, than ever before, the intrinsic syntactic manner in which the culture of architecture evolves has become less clear, so that the references that a building may make to other buildings from either the present or the past are no longer so assiduously recognized or even valued.