'intellectual edifice' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to refer to an idea, concept, or theory that has been built up from smaller ideas or theories, or to refer to a structure of knowledge or understanding. For example, “After years of research, he had created an impressive intellectual edifice of facts and theories.”.
The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year".
If we don't want such idiots running the country, we need to assault the intellectual edifice on which they stand.
One doesn't need a Nobel prize to know what brought about the collapse of this intellectual edifice.
Thus, quantum mechanics attracted some of the ablest scientists of the 20th century, and they erected what is perhaps the finest intellectual edifice of the period.
The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.Behavioural finance, the idea that investors are not always rational, is a flourishing subset of economics.
By October of last year, however, Greenspan was admitting that he was in a state of "shocked disbelief," because "the whole intellectual edifice" had "collapsed". Since this collapse of the intellectual edifice was also a collapse of real-world markets, the result was a severe recession — the worst, by many measures, since the Great Depression.
The structure that Norberg-Schulz has fashioned is surely one of the most impressive intellectual edifices that any architect has ever produced.
"… Quantum field theory is one of the great intellectual edifices in the history of human thought.
The intellectual and political edifice of Christianity, seemingly impregnable in the Middle Ages, fell in turn to the assaults made on it by humanism, the Renaissance, and the Protestant Reformation.
It's much harder to see in its contemporary incarnation – restrained by race hate laws and pesky EU jurisdiction against discrimination – but the intellectual and cultural edifice of whiteness has never truly been dismantled.
Fukuyama's thesis proposes a kind of fatalism that is worth resisting, but it is not an intellectual ornament on the edifice of American hegemony — or a rationale for invasion, occupation, and conversion of the non-Westernized world.
