Preface: The essay traces the relation of three texts in terms of the author’s engagement with various periods and their position or stance within the architectural theory to construct an argument that texts are a product of the time they are written in and there is a constant transition in perception. The three texts chosen have varied intentions to look at the past and consequently navigate the past with an agenda to investigate, comment, and frame architecture. These texts are a part of a larger meshwork of ideas that were active at their respective times and have found a voice in different mediums too, such as art, sculpture, music etc. The first text is ‘Towards a new architecture’ by Le Corbusier, which explores the past to enable him to comment on the present and to a larger extent present architectural ideas for the future. The text is an influential text from the 1930s and has also borrowed from modernist ideas to construct a narrative. The second text is ‘Complexity and Contradiction’ by Robert Venturi, where Venturi discusses buildings from the past to explore their characteristics and applicability, and subsequently dismisses the ideas of modernism. The book has been seen as a gentle manifesto by the author. Chronologically, the text was written after Le Corbusier’s text and encompasses postmodernist ideologies. The third, and most recent of the texts is by Kaiwan Mehta, ‘Alice in Bhuleshwar’ which delves into a Mumbai neighborhood to explore the connection of buildings and their inhabitants and the various factors at play. The framework the text is placed in is drastically different as the city here is being unfolded through local narratives and stories. Thus, there are clearly defined positions which the authors take concerning architecture and history. The essay here compares the three to pose an argument that architectural writing is not a linear trajectory of thoughts but is a result of the ideological fabric of the time and to decode it is to enable one to trace some context-specific developments in writings about architecture. The motto here is also to identify and decode the larger changes and events which surround the text and thereby decipher the transitions.Conclusion: The essay traces the transformation of ideological meshwork by contextualizing it in time and place. This holds value because it is through the understanding of these contexts and transformations that we can know how we have reached the social and theoretical fabric that we are placed in today. The ideas present in a society at a given moment in time are encapsulated in the texts (and also other modes, such as architecture, art, etc.) of those respective periods, thus looking at them in their relative setting adds more nuances to the reading. As the three texts chosen here are the products of three distinct contexts, they offer an opportunity to investigate how perceptions change with time. This is not to be reductionist and say that it is a chronological and linear transformation, but to say that as the time passes and contexts change, as events shape the society, and as different frameworks of analysis emerge, the ‘production’ of ‘representation’ changes. The first text, Towards a new architecture, was set in a modernist context, which when looked at from a distance today (in terms of time), is an outcome of a zeitgeist that defines the period. The next evidence discusses Venturi’s text in a postwar period and his thought processes and position concerning the architecture of the past, apart from exploring the new theoretical framework to look at the architecture that he advocated. The third text, Alice in Bhuleshwar frames experiential navigation and spatial stories of a neighborhood in Mumbai. Set in the post-liberalization period, it demonstrates flexibility and individuality. As said before, this does not necessarily form either a cyclic or a chronological series of transformations, it rather suggests that the perceptions of people are a construct of their contexts, which is in constant flux, and it becomes a vital building block to extend the scholarship on how architectural theory and practice is shaped today. Link to the essay.