Organizing the past 73addition to Tafuri’s own books on political and ideological
themes, which concern settings as diverse as Vienna, the
Soviet Union, Venice, Rome, the United States and Germany,
a steady stream of publications have followed his cues or
established new entries to this subject.^61 It is reasonable that
politics would present an early locus for thematic histories
of architecture. A thematic approach, as it was fi rst tested,
had a political mission in relation to the traditional tech-
niques for researching, organizing and writing architectural
history.^62 Organization along thematic lines permitted histo-
rians to account for evidence and analytical perspectives for
which a history of style, for instance, or type simply did not
allow. The historical studies presented in the American
journal Oppositions (1973–84) explored many of the impli-
cations of this historiographical theme (alongside, notably,
the theme of language). In its uptake of the Oppositions
project, the later journal Assemblage (1986–2000) advanced
this theme through its preoccupation with representation.
William J. Mitchell’s City of Bits (1995) might now seem
naïve as a study in the architectural parallels offered by the
‘Netscape’ generation of internet life (‘Now, I just said that
[email protected] was my name, but you might equally well [or
equally inappositely] claim that it was my address’^63 ). His
book was, nonetheless, one of the fi rst to open architectural
theory to this theme, and to explore problems of the newly
broadened experiences of networked life. It also offers a
useful example of a strategic dislocation of architectural
themes and theories from architecture qua architecture.
Mitchell trades physical space for virtual space, studying
the manner in which online communities were built and
maintained in parallel to communities contingent on the
occupation of land and three-dimensional space. Within a
theoretical-critical approach he seeks to understand the
nature of the infrastructure necessary to conduct business,
communicate and otherwise interact virtually, all the aspects
of a way of life that quickly became the norm. Positioned
thus, architecture and its theory had a new role in bridging
existing and emerging phenomena critically, theoretically and
historically. Mitchell’s City of Bits might now be a historical
record of this turn in its own right, sitting alongside
Jean-François Lyotard’s Moralités postmodernes (1993) or