Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture
Mark Lee, with introduction by Sarah M. Whiting and afterwords from Michelle JaJa Chang, K. Michael Hays, Andrew Holder, Jeannette Kuo, and Jorge Silvetti

On the occasion of his fifth and final year as chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, architect and educator Mark Lee strings together five “footnotes”—on history, on cadence, on autonomy, on America, and on point—to assess the relationship between architectural education, research, and professional practice. Evoking a similar position that marked his tenure, Lee delivers a lecture that embraces dialogue, context, and precedent, and rejects the notion of a heroic manifesto in favor of the footnote: “something ancillary, something used for referencing and providing citations for metanarratives that already exist.” And why five? “It’s a ubiquitous number in the culture of archi- tecture. Five orders, five architects, five points.”

Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture is the thirteenth title in The Incidents , a book series based on events at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.