(Silvetti Response) or The State of Architectural Form-making

Jorge Silvetti is a very eloquent writer and clearly very passionate about this topic. As well he should be because his writing is concerned with the apparent death of Architectural form-making. Not "form-making" meaning "willful design", but as it concerns creating meaning in a profession that must be embedded in the culture it is designing for.
The issues he tackles, Programism, Production Modes, Thematization, Blobs and Literalism, in his opinion all undercut the ability of an Architect to make forms that are relevant and insistent to their culture. I would absolutely agree, given his portrayal of the State of Architectural Form-making.
Programism and Literalism belong together. They are both symptoms of a lack of imagination on behalf of the Architect. The symptoms use a program diagram or a description of how culture works ("Flows" and blobs) as the originator of the Architectural Gesture. He describes this as "a first example of a process that potentially exonerates the architect from his or her creative role" and that the synthesis of data into form is "the quintessential and minimum ability that an architect ought to display".(23-24) Amazingly, Architects seem to be looking to give away responsibility for the Architectural object. When a flow, or system, or diagram becomes the generator, the Architect is no longer the author of that building, the representation/diagram is.
To be an Architect is to continually evaluate the needs of the client/site/community/environment/culture and to craft a building that is as in keeping with these sometimes disparate goals as possible.
"Thematization" does a rather similar thing to the others, though I separate it since it might result from Postmodernism more than a lack of imagination. It has the similar goals to

shorten the distance between the model used as referent and the architecture produced to invoke it, and aims to elicit in the beholder either the pleasure of a momentary, playful, and contrived enactment or the delusion of the restitution of a whole way of life and its values.(24)

Pretty sad. Silvetti is saying that thematization is the result of the Cultural Revivalist in all of us. The quote distinguishes itself from the section on Blobs, where the goal was to establish an Architecture without referent.
I assume that we do not build into a void. The system is full of ideas not my own of what Architecture is and does, some good, some bad. The idea of architecture without precedent cannot be engaged fruitfully as it is a bad form of naivete that will stifle creative alternatives to precedent. To reduce it to an aphorism, you cannot create a future without a past.
I enjoyed the reading very much, as it took to issue the creative failures of a lot of contemporary ideas that had good intentions. The idea that once an idea is posited, it is pure is false, and Silvetti recognizes and addresses that in his postscript.