Five Footnotes Toward an Architecture

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 as Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 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 architecture. Five orders, five architects, five points.”, 

Mark Lee

Sternberg Press / Harvard Design Press, 2026

18 X 12 cm, 312 pages