architecture is our sex exerpt

Clearly what it means for a building to be "sensitive" to its site is more complicated than I have initially set out here; I merely want to note the essential arbitrariness of the definition of site that is at work in these projects, and, by extension, in the work of the many architects (and landscape architects) who, to varying degrees, use the same means. Here site is only that limited field of physical facts or factors, no matter how far flung, and at the expense of all others, that the designer needs to justify the form of composition that he or she wants to make, regardless of the landscape. This is of course Rem Koolhaas's notorious Paranoid-Critical Method at work, the gist of which, as defined in Koolhaas's great Delirious New York, being that the willfully predetermined design solution — or at least the willful predetermination of what will be formally acceptable in a design solution — is masked in innocence by seemingly neutral methods of production relying on apparently external parameters.

Though the exact form may not be known in advance, the formal characteristics are. That is why the orders mapped sometimes turn out to be hidden, discovered, conveniently, by the architect.