Conclusion

Abstract

Abstract The conclusion assesses the writings of a range of modern and contemporary architects, starting with Daniel Libeskind and working back through Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. The focus is on how architects across the period have understood and used poetry as a metaphor or analogy, and sometimes a practice, which helps them to describe their own work. Through close readings of a number of memoirs and essays, and selected comparisons between architectural and poetic renderings, it becomes clear that poetry represents a limit case for architecture. The turn to the “poetic” offers a useful recourse for architects when they reach the outer edges of their capacity to articulate their own work. Thus poetic innovation outpaces the architectural.