Since the beginning of the century, the field of architecture has fervently turned its attention to documenting the contemporary urban condition. Every city been has been examined as a repository of architectural concepts, scrutinized as an urban manifesto, and recorded as a series of found objects.

The Ordinary articulates a potential genealogy for this practice and for the genre of books derived from it. Organized around conversations with the authors of three seminal texts that document the city--Denise Scott Brown's Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Rem Koolhaas's...