Comprising essays involving the persona of the architect, the structure of everyday environment, and the role of the architect's work, this title examines the role of the architect as a professional descendent of Palladio, and as an heir to his architectural legacy. It also opens a debate across design theory, professional practice, and more.

Based on many years of personal observation, Habraken's important new book critically examines the role of the architect as a professional descendent of Palladio, and as an heir to his architectural legacy. Seven innovative and carefully crafted essays explore the widening ideological schism between today's architects whose core values, identity, and education remain rooted in the Renaissance legacy of creating artful 'masterpieces', and the practical demands on a profession which acts within an evolving, ubiquitous, and autonomous built environment or 'field'. Clearly written yet expressing complex evolving ideas, this extended argument opens a new forum of debate across design theory, professional practice, and academic issues. Moving the subject on from a historical perspective, Habraken shows how architects are increasingly involved in the design of everyday buildings. This must lead to a reassessment of architects' identities, values and education, and the contribution of the architect in the shaping of the built environment.

Chapter 1: A Role Model
Palladio and the role of his persona and body of published work as a model for succeeding generations of architects.
Chapter 2: Leaving the Field
Alberti proclaimed the new Renaissance persona of the architect, emancipated from everyday environment and its constraints. How the resulting Architecture arose within the broader context of the fields of everyday environment.
Chapter 3: About Fields
Detailed discussion of the phenomenon of fields, their character of theme and variation, how they grow, transform adn sustain themselves. Within fields, ordinary fabric coexists with exceptional and monumental architecture.
Chapter 4: Encounters with the Field
In the twentieth century, as architects increasingly began to design everyday buildings within everyday environment, urbanists and architects ranging from Tony Garnier, Le Corbusier and CIAM to Venturi and Scott Brown and van Eyck found new inspiration in the fields of ordinary environment.
Chapter 5: In the Field
In contemporary practice, architects immersed in the field discover the thematic quality of its inherent structures, and how they structure relationships between forms and also between designers. The complexities of design in the field demand tools, methods and a level of sophistication far beyond the ability to invent free-standing sculptural form.
Chapter 6: Engaging the Field
To design projects the size of historical cities requires an understanding of the structure of ordinary environment and of how inherent environmental levels structure both domains of intervention and the distribution of design. In response, architecture and practice are developing new and different tools and methods and a new professional body of knowledge of the profession. These must ultimately be supported by changes in education and in historiography.
Chapter 7: About an Attitude in Making Architecture
The deeply ingrained assumption that the health, vigour and future of built environment depends on the architect turns out to be incorrect. Once architects perceive their intervention as a contribution to an ongoing process, understand that all design is partial, and accept the fact that many architects will never throughout their professional lives design an entire building, an entirely new realm of possibilies is revealed.