This is not a drill.

5 CODES: ARCHITECTURE, PARANOIA AND RISK IN TIMES OFTERROR

Edited by IGMADE. Basel: Birkhauser. 2006. $40

Some people will recall the heady days of the early 1970s when such as Peter Eisenman could give a lecture which focused on theory, in his case a trivial reading of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. As Eisenman dug himself deeper into his misunderstanding of the great French structuralist, this writer began to suspect that the appropriation of thinking from other disciplines to bolster weak architecture could be a passing disease. Later Karl Popper, controversial and self-promoting theorist of the processes of the physical sciences, would surface not only in art history but among architectural scribes. Lately, the love affair between various architects and Jacques Derrida has caused a new spasm in the ability to construct comprehensible texts to assist the architectural profession in the pursuit of knowledge, understanding or just new shapes. Given this unfortunate but recent tradition, this collection of essays and projects introduces the cultural theoretician Helmut Muhlmann to those needing such support.

The editorial collective IGMADE (www.igmade.de) take their title from the post 9/11 Department of Homeland Security's coding of terror alert from green (low) in five steps to red (severe). An alternative title to 5 Codes might have been Logical Jumping. An example from the introduction: 'In the Modernist period the Western world ran out of opponents of equal stature because its military techniques were superior. This was the only way an aesthetic of culture could be established that could forget its military origins.' China? Well at least we are safe in the knowledge that there are no historical materialists here. One author claims fire insurance was instituted in 1676 ten years after the emergence of London fire insurer Nicholas Barbon. But hey that is as much of a quibble as to ask why Colomina's bibliophiliac meanderings on the New York World's Fair are worth including. Chomsky, as always, makes sense refusing to be drawn into the interviewer's paranoia; he deftly points out that there were two 9/11s, the first being the illegal US-backed overthrow and assassination of President Allende in Chile in 1973.

Reading sequentially we enter the yellow zone and the chilling history of how Israeli military used the planning of settlements to drive a wedge between villages and the city of Salfit in Palestine. Weizman continues work begun with the late Paul Hirst and the detail of the suppression of Palestinians by the Israelis grows more and more outrageous. This is uncomfortable writing because anyone with any moral conscience should know that these actions are ones that should be stopped, and our governments don't. In the Muhlmann essay 'The Economics Machine', he asks: 'How is transcendence created? It is created by undervaluing slowness'. Reader, expect no answer--his paper dissolves into an acronym-ridden discussion of economic cycles and the conclusion is that more research is needed. I concentrate on these essays, ignoring those of Martin Pawley or Brian Massumi, because rather than support the generalised thesis that 9/11 changed the zeitgeist and the way we look at the world this collection of essays, like so many other anthologies, is little more than a thick magazine. Emphasis on thick. Thrashing around like naughty scallies caught in flagrante these writers want so desperately to be contemporary that they ignore all the better writing that has preceded their efforts--think of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Agamben or Jean-Luc Nancy And this is what makes architectural theory so problematic: more concerned to discuss attitudes and posing than constructions and the processes which produce them. I ask one question: how many writers here can read a plan?