Diverse examples rather than exemplary works, the architectures that illustrate Rafael Moneo’s arguments here may be attached to sympathies or currents, but they are most correctly dealt with in the context of their respective authors’ biographies. In a world where the individual prevails over the collective, movements and schools have given way to signatures. Moneo’s own work in the nineties could be established as a lesson on compactness, but is better understood as a personal exploration – dating back, perhaps, to his bank in Jaén – of how a prism breaks up on plan and section. We could also put Eberswalde in the epithelial minimalist framework of the German-speaking Swiss, but it is treated with greater precision when seen as part of Herzog & De Meuron’s insistent insertion of architecture in art and everyday life alike. As for Serralves, Ada Louise Huxtable extravagantly teamed Siza up with Gehry and Portzamparc to form a holy trinity of ‘new architecture’, yet no one will deny that the Portuguese master’s lyrical and fragmented language is the result of a very subjective sensibility. Finally, Zaha Hadid’s buildings at Weil am Rhein could conveniently be ascribed to the cosmopolitan sisterhood of deconstruction, but her unstable forms unmistakably come from a personal poetic that managed to crystallize in the experimental hotbed of London’s Architectural Association.

It feels reassuring to sketch a panorama that, acknowledging the marginal survival of Anglo-Saxon sharp-edged fractures, makes the warped topographies of the Dutch and the tactile geometries of the Swiss the two ‘formless’ poles of contemporary debate: a contrast between emotive disorder and intellectual order for which critical media have coined the expression ‘blobs and boxes’. Blobs and boxes often trade roles, however, so that aleatory masses become painstaking graphic and mental artifices while the most rigorous shapes take on an unexpected dimension of emotional violence. But terms like reason and passion, safety and risk, are probably just as inadequate as blobs and boxes – ill-fit to describe a fractured and formless landscape where choral camaraderie has given way to the individual shine of soloists.