Architect and Professor Malcolm Quantrill have held an unusual place in architectural scholarship over the last 50 years. He has taught architecture and travelled extensively, from London to Finland, from Oman to Montana, becoming the first Distinguished Professor in Architecture at Texas A&M University. The Ark of Architecture is both a reader and a re-reader of an acute architectural eye and mind. Quantrill's texts move effortlessly from the literary to the architectural and his analysis of the work of memory, landscape, and some of the more unusual drivers behind Modern Architecture remain memorable. Quantrill's methodology allows him to coax and at times subtly needle his ?subject? to produce unusual results. His interviewing of architects as different as Reima Pietil,, Norman Foster and Brian MacKay- Lyons show a lively movement of thought as he cleverly uses history and the past to ward off the frailty and often faddishness of the present.