Choosing a method of analysis

As an architecture student, I found Holdsworth's essay to be a great provocation. In school we are asked to produce, produce, produce. Through our many plans, sections, diagrams, perspectives, etc. we are taught to represent some grand, great, or good idea about the built environment and usually we inflect those representations with some kind of narrative about the social or environmental context of the project. As a visual discipline I think we're habituated to proliferate visual ideas that are quite thin when it comes to an understanding of site - it's like we're told to just produce something appealing and then defend it to the death. We examine something like noise level on the street, make a beautiful diagram to take up space on our boards, but in actuality the diagram is not even related to our final product. How responsible are architects for responding to the landscapes Holdsworth presents? Is it our duty to leave the visual field and enter the domain of the archive before we finalize our plans? Moreover, do we need to align our site analysis with one, or many, of the schools of theory he discusses? For example, without a Marxist understanding of landscape, are we doomed to proliferate buildings that operate as agents of neoliberalism? Or have we all already chosen our theoretical school without even knowing it - are we practicing the liberal pluralism of American Popular Culture Studies that Paul Duncum denounces as having less analytic muscle than the neo-Marxism of Cultural Studies in England?