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Building Theories speaks to the value of words in architecture. It addresses the author's fascination for the thoughts of architects, builders, and craftspeople whose voices, however faint, remain captured in text. Building Theories also considers how contemporary scholarship in architectural theory and design has steered far from the subject of building. Only with much difficulty can one identify current discussions on the subject of architecture for which both design and construction are central to their concerns. Differently, Building Theories argues for a return to the practice of architectural theory that is set amongst ideas about building, buildings, and builders. It argues that subjects rarely addressed by contemporary architectural theory, were once seminal to its definition and emblematic of the interdependence of design and construction. It highlights treatises, essays, articles, and letters by those who have been, throughout history, committed to the art of building. This journey of close reading reinterprets the words of Vitruvius, Alberti, de L'Orme, Le Camus de Mézières, Boullée, Laugier, Rondelet, Semper, Viollet-le-Duc, Hübsch, Bötticher, Berlage, Muthesius, Wagner, Behrendt, Gropius, and Arup. With chapters dedicated to texts written during antiquity, across the renaissance, and into the nineteenth century, and with a critical eye on the brand of architectural theory popularized in the Anglo-Saxon world post-1968, readers are introduced to a wider breadth of material and representational ideas that once animated the discipline. In this way, Building Theories argues for a realignment of architecture with the idea of techné, with a dual commitment to fabrica e ratio, with a productive return to l'art de bien bastîr, with an accurate translation of the term Baukunst, and with an appeal to cultivating the architect's 'composite mind.' Students, practitioners, and educators will identify in Building Theories ways of thinking that never separate design from construction, nor premise its precedence; that acknowledge aesthetics to be an insufficient scaffold for subtending the subject of architectural ethics; and that recognize how material transformations have always been at the origins of built form.