David Leatherbarrow's books [like Architecture Oriented Otherwise] are great. 

Place and Placelessness by E. Relph

Thanks I will get on it  :)

Edward Casey, J B Jackson, Caccio (Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place), Jane Jacobs.

I wonder whether reading about place isn't counterintuitive. I'm not saying that that would be something bad to do, necessarily...but that counter-intuition would be brought back as a foray into the realm that is more naturally presided over by intuition. Does gehry read context? Does eisenman? Doesn't the former hypo-contextualize and the latter hyper-contextualize (here, it is my suspicion that eisenman's 'excessive' outreach and inreach betray exactly that pathology of contextualizing and an ensuing morality/moralization - recall eisenman's comments during the crit in wolf prix studio? It is not just the physical that is the context, it is the whole history of the physical that he wants to encapsulate as context. In fact, it is the studied everything-as long as its equivalently hyperstudied (in other words, hyper dissociated and hyper reassociated) that is his context. A spinozatic God-Context.) In effect, however, who is more adept at contextualizing? How or what about critical regionalism? Being aware of context (a first critical moment) ...does it not, simultaneously, dissociate you from it? In other words, waking the vernacular from its slumber into an abstracted, dissociative and discursive world...does it really replicate 'context' (and here a pause, or a pose...isn't context a replication...namely of relationships..replication of commonalities...self-replication of a will-unto-itself) or does it bring the core of reflexive modernism, ethereal,  into the body of the un- or subconscious vernacular, cthonic? In other words engender a really unheimliche architecture; sort of like those characters in scifi / horror movies who retain the tropes of banality from the outside (not a wound) but who are invaded from within by alien hosts with ulterior motives. 

When we talk and study context in such a dedicated and moral way, have we not started to decontextualize context?

i'm not exactly sure why but i have always been drawn to the 'defaced/ing' architecture of people like dominique perrault, wiel arets, david chipperfield. 

they  very sensitively decontextualize themselves out of each context. there is such a thing as sensitive decontextualization, isn't there? physical context, aesthetic context...

i'm also not saying that this necessarily constitutes a good thing (or bad). but isn't there a more laissez-faire...even vernacular...propensity towards its equivocality apropos context? 

on the other hand, is such an architecture not a form of symbolic complacency? by that i mean with complacent in regards to the symbolic allusion to the globalist neoliberal space?which is to say, the very question of "context" now is none other than the neoliberal context, the non-context (if i can relate that to Marc Augé's non-place).

or can such an architecture be viewed as a critical complacency where a regionalist architecture practicing within the conscious framework of neoliberalism (for instance, modern "traditional arabian architecture" in abu dhabi) can be viewed as a facile servile one?

or is there no difference other than in the nature of the creative anus? that is to say, we're all fucked and there's no way out of Descartes' anus?