Week 4 Reading Reflections

I found this weeks chapter by winters a little harder to intake than the previous readings, I'm not sure whether it was the noise from the cafe I was reading in that distracted me, but I failed to understand how he substantiated all his facts into an architectural theory. In general, what I took out from the text having reread it, was that social and philosophical thought had directly impacted on architecture throughout history. Having pondered this a while I thought yes, this makes sense, but is it really a substantial claim? After all, most philosophical thought filters down someway or another into our physical domain. 

This got me thinking about our project, and in the same regard, how an intellectual idea (and quite an abstract thought at that) would filter down and impact the physical world. Often the implications are highly unpredictable, and if you have predicted them, they usually turn out differently or for different reasons. So I suppose grounding this idea of a constant flux of knowledge into our built environment is my next task. While I suppose aesthetically and functionally it would rapidly cycle through styles and changes, there are a lot of outside factors to consider such as tedious government legislative processes, peoples disposition and fear of change, as well as tradition locked down by faith and less rational thought. How can we predict, let alone fathom a lot of these things?