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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 introduction

We could not live without architecture, but that is not why it

matters. The purpose of this book is to explain what buildings do
beyond keeping us out of the rain. Architecture may be able to
stake a claim to being necessary to our lives in a way that poetry
and literature and painting cannot, but the fact that buildings
give us shelter is not the answer to the question posed by the title.
If it were as simple as that, there would be nothing left to say.
Architecture begins to matter when it goes beyond protecting
us from the elements, when it begins to say something about the
worldwhen it begins to take on the qualities of art. You could
say that architecture is what happens when people build with an
awareness that they are doing something that reaches at least a
little bit beyond the practical. It may be as tiny a gesture as
painting the front door of a house red or as grand an undertaking
as creating the rose window of a cathedral. It can be as casual as a
sliver of decorative molding around a window or as carefully
wrought as the ceiling of a Baroque church. A clapboard farm
house with a columned porch is architecture; so is a house by
Frank Lloyd Wright in which every inch of every wall, every
window, and every door is part of an elaborately considered
composition. Wright liked to say that architecture began when
he started building his sprawling modern houses on the Ameri
can prairie; Mies van der Rohe said, more poetically and also
more modestly, that the origin of architecture was in the first
time two bricks were put together well.
The making of architecture is intimately connected to the
knowledge that buildings instill within us emotional reactions.
They can make us feel and they can also make us think. Architec
ture begins to matter when it brings delight and sadness and
perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads. It matters
when it creates serenity or exhilaration, and it matters just as
much, I have to say, when it inspires anxiety, hostility, or fear.
Buildings can do all of these things, and more. They represent
social ideals; they are political statements; they are cultural icons.
Architecture is surely our greatest physical symbol of the idea of
community, our surest way to express in concrete form our belief
in the notion of common ground. The way a community builds
tells you, sometimes, all you need to know about its values: just
to look at Radburn, New Jersey, will tell you that it is a suburb
built to control the automobile, in the same way that it does not
take long to figure out that Positano and the rest of the Amalfi
Coast in Italy were built to connect to the sea. You can under
stand the difference between, say, the leafy precincts of Green
wich, Connecticut, and the suburban tracts of Levittown, Long
Island, more easily, I suspect, by comparing Greenwichs estates
to Levittowns houses than you could by looking at the residents
of each community. The people can mislead you more easily
than their architecture can.
Buildings also stand as evidence of the power of memory.
Who has not returned after many years to a house, a school, a
hotel, or some other place in which meaningful events in your
life occurred and not found that the buildings themselves un
leashed a sense of the past too strong to ignore? Architectural
historian Vincent Scully has said that architecture is a conversa
tion between the generations, carried out across time, and while
you could say that this is true of all forms of art and culture, in
architecture the conversation is the most conspicuous, the most
obvious, the most impossible to tune out. We may not all partici
pate in the conversation, but we all have to listen to it. For that
reason alone, architecture matters: because it is all around us, and
what is all around us has to have an effect on us. That effect may
be subtle and barely noticeable, or it may shake us to the core,
but it will never fail to be there.
Because architecture is there, presenting itself to us even when
we do not seek it out or even choose to be conscious of it, it
makes sense to think about it in slightly different terms from the
way in which we might discuss, say, Baroque music or Renais
sance sculpture, which is to say that it makes sense to consider it
not only in terms of great masterpieces but also in terms of
everyday experience. Architecture is a part of daily life for every
one, whether or not they want it to be. You may visit Chartres
Cathedral as a conscious act of intention, just as you might elect
to read Madame Bovary or decide to hear a performance of Bee
thovens late quartets, but you live your life within and around
and beside dozens of other buildings, almost none of which you
have chosen to be with. Some of them may be masterpieces and
some of them may be the architectural equivalent of dime-store
novels or elevator music. It is perfectly reasonable to talk about
the meaning of literature without talking about Danielle Steel,
but can you grapple with the impact of architecture without
looking at Main Street?
I tend to think not, which is why the pages that follow will deal
to a great extent with the everyday experience of looking at
buildings, which is, for most people, a major reasonsometimes
the only reasonthat architecture matters. Masterpieces are no
less important for this, and they will get plenty of attention here.
It is not wrong to say that the greatest buildings provide the
greatest moments of architectural experience. They certainly have
for me. But I prefer to see architecture not as a sequential story of
masterworks, a saga beginning with the Pyramids and the Par
thenon and extending through Chartres and the Taj Mahal and
the Duomo and the Laurentian Library and St. Pauls Cathedral,
and then on to the work of Louis Sullivan and Wright and Le
Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, but as a continuum of cultural
expression. Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into
space, Mies said. Buildings tell us what we are and what we want
to be, and sometimes it is the average ones that tell us the most.

There are surely some readers for whom architecture matters in a

more specific way than I have in mind here. For some, architec
ture matters because buildings are our greatest consumers of
energy (far more than cars), and if we do not reduce the amount of
energy consumed in constructing and maintaining our buildings,
we will be in far worse shape than if every MINI Cooper owner
traded in his car for a Hummer. I could not agree more with the
urgency of the green architecture movement and with the wisdom
as well as the practicality of making sustainable buildings. One of
the most encouraging developments in the past decade is the
extent to which the architectural profession has taken up the
values of the environmental movement and made many of them
its own. So I am in complete agreement with the move toward
sustainable architecture, and I do not discuss it in this book only
because my intention is to look at architecture from a broader and
less technical standpoint. But there can be no doubt that one of
the ways architecture continues to matter is in how it uses energy
and that reducing the amount of energy consumed by buildings
needs to be one of the highest priorities of our time.
By the same token, I am sure there are readers who feel that
architecture matters because the building industry occupies a
huge position in our economy and that if we can make it more
efficient, the entire economy will benefit. For others, architecture
matters because the technology of building is undergoing re
markable advances, allowing us to build all kinds of things that
architects once could barely dream about. And there are surely
readers who believe that architecture matters because people are
in desperate need of housing and that architecture has the poten
tial to address this as well as so many other urgent social needs.
Here again, I am in agreement, and I do discuss the issue of the
social responsibility of architecture in a limited way toward the
end of chapter i. But as with green architecture, the economics
and technical aspects of building are not the focus of this book,
however much I share a belief in their importance.

This book does not argue for a single theory of architecture, an

all-encompassing worldview that can dictate form to the archi
tect and explain it to the rest of us. I do not believe there is such a
thing as a universal recipe for good architecture; even in ages
with much more stylistic coherence than our own, there have
always been a myriad of ways in which different architects have
chosen to build. I am excited by the best architecture of any style
and any period, and although the focus of this book is almost
exclusively on Western architecture, what I say about space and
symbol and formand about the relation of everyday buildings
to special oneshas application to architecture of all cultures.
Architecture takes very different forms in different cultures, but
the nature of our experience with such fundamental matters as
proportion and scale and space and texture and materials and
shapes and light is not as different as the appearance of the
architecture itself may be. And it is the quest to understand these
basic things that interests me the mostfar more, surely, than
any theory or dogma or cultural tradition that argues that there is
a single acceptable way to build.
Architects, being artists, often see things differently, and they
should: it probably helps to produce an important body of work
if you believe that there is one true way. The blinders that theory
represents can be useful, maybe even essential, to artists in the
making of art. But I do not believe that they help the rest of us to
appreciate and understand it.
But if not theory, what? What determines whether, to use
Miess phrase, the bricks are put together well? Why do some
buildings lift the spirit and others depress it? Why are some
buildings a joy and others painful? And why do some hardly
register at all?
If there are many routes to the kingdom of architectural
heaven, it does not mean that there are not still guideposts along
the way. Something has to help us tell the good from the bad.
Some of those guideposts are purely aesthetic: much proportion,
for example, is based on the purity of the so-called Golden Sec
tion, the roughly three-by-five rectangle whose ratio of height to
width is particularly pleasing to the eye, neither too bluntly
square nor too elongated. We can analyze this and other com
binations that make buildings pleasing as objects until we are
blue in the face (and I will say something about such issues of
visual perception in chapter 3), but such analyses will take us
only so far. Ultimately architecture, though it can reach great
aesthetic heights, achieves its meaning from the balance between
aesthetic and other concerns. It must be understood as a complex
and often contradictory set of conditions, in which art seeks to
find some detente with the realities of the world. Architecture is
always a response to limitsphysical constraints, financial ones,
or the demands of function. If it is seen purely as art or purely as
a practical pursuit, it will never really be grasped.
In Art [Objects], Jeanette Winterson asks how we can know the
difference between art to be admired and art to be ignored.
Years ago, when I was living very briefly with a stockbroker
who had a good cellar, she says, I asked him how I could learn
about wine.
Drink it, he said.
And so it is. Experience is not sufficient, but it is necessary.
The only way to learn is to look, to look again, and then to look
some more. If that does not guarantee connoisseurship in art any
more than sampling a lot of wine can turn someone into a wine
expert, it is the only possible beginning, and ultimately the most
urgent part of the long process of learning. This book is firmly on
the side of experience. Between walking the streets and reading a
work of architectural history, I will always choose walking and
the power of real perception. Factswhether stylistic characteris
tics, names of obscure pieces of classical ornament, or the birth-
dates of great architectscan always be found later in books. The
sense of being in architectural spacewhat it feels like, how it
hits you in the eye and swirls around in your gut, and, if you are
very lucky, sends shivers up your spinecannot be understood
except by being there.
Everything has a feel to it. Not just masterpieces but every
thing in the built world. The purpose of this book is to come to
grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with
how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually.
This book is not a work of architectural history or a guide to the
styles or an architectural dictionary, though it contains elements
of all three of these. Its most important message, I hope, is to
encourage you to look, and to learn gradually how to trust your
eye. Look for essences, not for superficial stylistic detail. Think
about intentions, but do not be too forgiving on their behalf, for
they have given birth to more bad architecture than good. As in
art, intentions are necessary, but they are only a beginning, not
an end in themselves. How good intentions become serious ideas
which, in turn, inspire the creation of built form that is capable
of pleasing us or, better still, of moving us, is the subject of the
rest of this book.