Book of illusions? Theo Crosby’s <i>How to Play the Environment Game</i> in retrospect

Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions provides a meditation on to whom our deeds in a short life are known. In architecture, How to Play the Environment Game (HTPTEG) and its creator – Theo Crosby – are condensations of many of the same meditations. Fifty years after HTPTEG it is worth reflecting on what the exhibition, the book and the person tell us about architecture, its materialization, individual architects and even the value of canonical interpretations of architecture and its personalities. HTPTEG represented the impossibility of architectural intentionality in the production of the built environment and prompts the question of whether Crosby was content to disappear as an individual recognized in his own right and with his own distinct effects on the canon?