The early twenty-first-century reader is accustomed to the classificatory thinking that separated philosophy into three divisions (Kant’s three critiques). He or she would therefore expect architectural theory to present a similar systemic approach. But this is not so. This is because much in architectural theory, especially since the eighteenth century, is a polemic rather than a system of thought. An architectural polemic corroborates, propagates, or opposes other positions regarding a region of architecture without encompassing the comprehensiveness or completeness of the architectural sphere. This is not to say that a polemic is of superficial depth, for a polemic may elaborate an aspect of a system that has been categorized but not developed. An architectural theory that is systemic will elaborate the essential nature of this art, the purpose or ends for which it is made, and the means that it ought to use in order to fulfill its nature and attain its purpose.¹ A system also identifies the principles which are the very source of rules, as well as develops the rules which underlie the basis of conventions—a customary way of making or doing something. Principles, rules, and conventions are at once the province of the individual architect, as well as the collective experience of architects in their societal role. This is, after all, the very purpose of the architectural treatise in its three principal aims: the philosophical, didactic and technical. Finally, a system explains the relations (these relations include autonomy, commonality, and differences) between architecture and the other arts. All of these concern the phenomenological specificity of architecture.