Volume likes to think of itself as a critical magazine. Not in that it reviews and criticizes production, but in that it has a critical relation with architecture as practice and as notion. No problem up to now. Different worlds, different attitudes, the twain shall never meet, and they lived apart happily ever after…

The critic is dead. Long live the network! So it goes in our world of diffuse and shared knowledge. But if criticism has evolved into criticisms, how can we interpret and learn from the babble of opinions? This dilemma comes in tandem with another: the crisis of publishing. With declining print sales and slashed subsidies, many critics are out of work. Two fundamental tasks lie ahead: reviving the productive value of criticism, and finding new profitable ways to broadcast it to the world.

Since the architect-artist Luc Deleu (1944) founded T.O.P. Office in 1970, the bureau has made some thought provoking and critical contributions to the Flemish architectural landscape. Now that the office has celebrated its fortieth anniversary, Wouter Davidts, Stefaan Vervoort, and Guy Châtel found the need to bring Deleu and his office back to attention by composing a monograph. The human, urban, and global scale, as well as the concept of scale itself form the starting point of the architectural office, which could be called a research bureau more than an actual architectural practice. Building has never been its priority, because when you build something you really have to add something to the already saturated world, and not simply build just to build. The goal of the monograph is a “theoretical exploration of the work and practice of Luc Deleu and T.O.P. Office“ in which seven themes are each addressed by different written essays, a visual essay – created by fourteen different contributors – and a visual essay for every theme that was composed by Luc Deleu himself.