What is architecture's place in the world? Combining history, theory, and polemic, this text probes into the conceptual lineage and current expressions of postmodernism and the critique of postmodern architecture over the past four decades, revealing the general failure of these theories to develop an architecture that is politically engaged and affirmative of the public sphere. Hannah Arendt's imperative of worldliness plays a pivotal role in the author's reading of what has come to be called architecture's belief system. It is not enough, he argues, to reject the totalizing models of publicness that have been typical both of modernism and of many of its postmodern successors. Rather, he insists, it is necessary to construct a space of appearance that is large and diverse enough to make places for all of us. Baird stakes out clearly and sharply the recent history of ideas that bear on the field, recovering influences and ideas that have been omitted from standard histories of modernism and building an understanding of our present dilemmas that is constructive and critically informed.