An architect was believed to be an artist, but in the twentieth century he has moved from artist to technician. Today's eclecticism is a creative, cannibalistic combination of erudite nostalgia and extremely sophisticated esthetics. It needs revisionist history to feed on. The results are acutely artful exercises in cultural memory and personal value projection. This essay argues that contemporary architecture has reduced the esthetic function of architecture to a “non-architecture” characterized by unresolved relationships to the social and symbolic realities of our present age.