This book proposes an historical and theoretical path. The research is about the possibilities of expression of a judgment on political and social issues in the architectural project as in the art practices. The author tries to reconstruct a debate which covers differents contexts, between United States and Italy from the late sixties to the early seventies. The matter of these connections is the factual and theoretical relationship between art criticism and architecture. The places of the survey are the editorial offices of reviews, the cultural institutions and the works, as well. The protagonists are more and less acknowledged figures which criticized, proposed, misunderstood those forms of philosophical thought which adopted language as a Knowledge metaphor, as a place where to refer their discourse on artistic and architectural practices.

The main questions which emerge from this survey are: does the architectural project need art? And what about the political and social engagement in architectural theory? In an explicit opposition to the equivalence stated by some of the post-modern interpretations, the inquiry about the social engagement in art comes out from a perspective confrontation with the avant-garde motions. The answer to these questions redefines the subjects of Figurability, Allegory and Form in architecture.