The book inserts itself in a list of recent revisionist texts about postmodernism in architecture, and explores the intellectual framework of a series of architects who—from the 1970s to the 1980s—saw their architecture suspended inbetween their fictions about the nature of the "absolute," on the one hand, and physical reality, on the other. The text proposes that "irony" has been the operative notion that made the resulting conceptual paradoxes of this double orientation justifiable. The book dismantles a number of clichés about the "facile" aesthetics and ethics of architectural postmodernism, and proposes a connection between the long philosophical traditions of irony since Socrates, and a number of rhetorical morphologies in the architecture of Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown, Stanley Tigerman, Arata Isozaki, Peter Eisenman, and Rem Koolhaas.

Emmanuel Petit is associate professor in the Yale School of Architecture. He received his MA and a PhD degrees from Princeton University (2001, 2006), and an MArch from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH, 1998). He is editor of Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change, published by Yale University Press in 2009, and made possible in part by a grant from the Graham Foundation. The book received an Independent Publisher Book Award, which "recognizes excellence in independent publishing." He is also editor of Stanley Tigerman: Schlepping Through Ambivalence ( Yale University Press, 2011). His essays have appeared in JSAH, Log, Thesis, Trans, Thresholds,  Archithese, Perspecta, and Constructs, as well as in a number of exhibition catalogues (V&A London and MAK Vienna, among others). He is curator of the forthcoming Yale exhibition Ceci n'est pas une reverie: The Architecture of Stanley Tigerman; curator of the 2010 exhibition An Architect's Legacy: James Stirling's Students at Yale, 1959-83; cocurator of Peter Eisenman's exhibition Barefoot on White-Hot Walls at the Museum for Applied Art in Vienna (2004).Together with Ralitza Petit, he is founding partner of the architectural practice EPISTEME LLC.