Ch1. - Paul Goldberger - Why Architecture Matters

why architecture matters
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paul
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why
architecture
matters
R e v ise d E di t ion
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by Paul Goldberger.
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Revised edition
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also by paul goldberger
The City Observed, New York: An Architectural Guide to

Manhattan
The Skyscraper
On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Post-modern Age
Houses of the Hamptons
The World Trade Center Remembered
Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of
New York
Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of
Architecture
Building with History
Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City
Dumbo: The Making of a Neighborhood and the Rebirth of
Brooklyn
For Susan; Adam and Delphine; Ben and
Melissa; Alex and Carolyna; Thibeaux,
Josephine, Julian, Arlo, and Gabriel
And to the memory of Vincent Scully, Ada

Louise Huxtable, and Alexander Garvin,
all of whom helped me understand why
architecture matters
contents
Introduction ix
one Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 1
two Challenge and Comfort 45
three Architecture as Object 69
four Architecture as Space 114
five Architecture and Memory 143
six Buildings and Time 175
seven Buildings and the Making of Place 218
Afterword: Architecture, Power, and
Pleasure 243
Glossary 253
A Note on Bibliography 263
Acknowledgments 269
Illustration Credits 275
Index 277
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
world—when 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
x Introduction
Island, more easily, I suspect, by comparing Greenwich’s estates
to Levittown’s 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
Introduction xi
to read Madame Bovary or decide to hear a performance of Bee
thoven’s 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 reason—sometimes
the only reason—that 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 great-
est 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. Paul’s 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-
xii Introduction
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
Introduction xiii
social responsibility of architecture in a limited way toward the
end of chapter 1. 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 form—and about the relation of everyday buildings
to special ones—has 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 ar-
chitecture itself may be. And it is the quest to understand these
basic things that interests me the most—far 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
xiv Introduction
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
Mies’s 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 limits—physical 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.
Introduction xv
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. Facts—whether stylistic characteris
tics, names of obscure pieces of classical ornament, or the birth
dates of great architects—can always be found later in books. The
sense of being in architectural space—what 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 spine—cannot 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
xvi Introduction
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.
Introduction xvii
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1
meaning,
culture,
There is no doubt whatever about
the influence of architecture and
structure upon human character
and symbol and action. We make our buildings
and afterwards they make us. They
regulate the course of our lives.
winston churchill
I
know that architecture matters very much to me, but I have
no desire to claim that it can save the world. Great architec
ture is not bread on the table, and it is not justice in the
courtroom. It affects the quality of life, yes, and often with an
astonishing degree of power. But it does not heal the sick, teach
the ignorant, or in and of itself sustain life. At its best, it can
help to heal and to teach by creating a comfortable and uplifting
environment for these things to take place in. This is but one of
the ways in which architecture, though it may not sustain life,
can give the already sustained life meaning. When we talk about
how architecture matters, it is important to understand that the
way in which it matters—beyond, of course, the obvious fact
of shelter—is the same way in which any kind of art matters: it
makes life better.
Paradoxically, it is often the most mundane architecture that
means the most to us—the roof over our heads, the random
buildings that protect us from the rain and give us places to work
and shop and sleep and be entertained. Buildings like these—the
vernacular, the standard architectural language—are not the fo-
cus of this book, but I will discuss them because I reject the view
that a clear line can be drawn between serious architecture and
ordinary buildings. ‘‘A bicycle shed is a building, Lincoln Cathe-
2 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

dral is architecture,’’ wrote the art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner,
but what of it? Both are buildings, both are architecture. Lincoln
Cathedral is a vastly more complex and profound work of archi
tecture than the bicycle shed, and it was created with more noble
aspirations. But each structure has something to say about the
culture that built it, each structure is of at least some interest
visually, and each structure evokes certain feelings and emotions.
There is much more to say about a great cathedral than about a
generic shed, but each helps shape our environment. And the
companions of the bicycle shed, the vernacular commercial and
residential architecture of the mall and the highway strip and the
suburban town of today, have a much greater impact on where
we live than a distant cathedral.
Such buildings are not masterpieces, and woe to the politically
correct critic who says they are. Yet we ignore them at our peril.
McDonald’s restaurants? Las Vegas casinos? Mobile homes and
suburban tract houses and strip malls and shopping centers and
office parks? They can be banal or they can be joyful and witty,
but they are rarely transcendent. Yet they tell us much about who
we are and about the places we want to make. And often they
work well, galling as this is for most architecture critics to admit.
Much of the built world in the United States is ugly, but then
again, most of nineteenth-century London seemed ugly to Lon
doners, too. The artlessness of most of our built environment
today probably reveals as much about us as the design of Paris or
Rome revealed about the cultures that built those cities. What is
certain is that it is impossible to think seriously about architec
ture today and not think about the built environment as a whole.
Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 3

It is all connected and interdependent, from freeways to gardens,
from shopping malls to churches and skyscrapers and gas sta
tions. I have no desire to romanticize the landscape that sur
rounds us at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but I
know that Pevsner’s academic distinction no longer holds up.
Perhaps it never did, though there was surely a time when
ordinary, everyday architecture seemed in many ways a sim
plified, scaled-down edition of great architecture, and the quali
tative difference between the two was barely noticeable. Yes, the
Georgian row house in London was more modest than the great
country estate, but the two were of a kind; they spoke the same
language, and even the simple slum houses seemed like stripped
down versions of the great house, bargain-basement offerings
from the same catalogue. It is striking that it was such a relatively
coherent architectural culture as that of London and other West
ern European cities that moved Pevsner to make his arbitrary and
cold-hearted distinction between Architecture with a capital ‘‘A’’
and mere buildings, since the mere buildings of his experience in
the early decades of the past century were far more ambitious as
works of architecture than the mere buildings we see today. In
eighteenth-century London, Georgian architecture created a lan
guage, and out of that language of architectural elements both
ordinary buildings and masterpieces could be made. If you were
an architect you understood the language well and could write
in it; if you were an educated layman, you could recognize and
appreciate its details. But if you lacked any knowledge at all, you
could still take pleasure in the clarity and the rhythm of the

buildings constructed in that language, and you could see the
way it created a city of lively beauty.
We need not speak only of London or of Europe. In nine
teenth- and early-twentieth-century New York, for example,
there was a quality to the brownstones that lined the side streets,
and to the Georgian- and Renaissance-inspired apartment build
ings that later lined the avenues, and even to the cramped and
fetid tenements, that also suggested a common architectural lan
guage. It was a language of masonry, redolent with ornament and
detail, emerging from the belief that every building, no matter
how private, showed a public presence—that it had an obligation
to the street and to anyone who passed before it, whether or not
they had reason to walk through its doors. A language of scale
was shared by the buildings that together formed the streets of
New York in the hundred years from the mid-nineteenth century
to the mid-twentieth; though the buildings were often large, they
were oriented to the pedestrian and connected to one another as
elements along a street—elements of a larger whole, not pri
marily objects in themselves. This common language reflected a
respect for background, for the notion that buildings create an
urban fabric, and from that comes the beginning of a civilized
environment.
It is odd to think of the decorated cornice on a Ninth Avenue
tenement as a gesture of civilization, but in the cityscape of New
York at the end of the nineteenth century, it surely was. That
cornice engages the eye, connects the building to its neighbors
visually, and makes it part of the larger composition of the street.

And it suggests that a building has some purpose other than
merely keeping its occupants out of the rain—to say that it ex-
ists, in however a meager, awkward, even vulgar way, to enrich
the city around it. It makes gestures to you and to me, even if
we never have any connection to it other than walking by.
That intention, the way in which the tenement was clearly
intended to enrich the street and therefore the life of the city, is
what makes Pevsner’s distinction less than useful today. Is the
decorated tenement simply a fancy bicycle shed? Or is it an
earthbound echo of Lincoln Cathedral? An improved ape or a
damaged angel? The tenement is a practical construction de
signed to be more than merely practical, and—leaving value
judgments aside—that is as good a definition of architecture as
I can imagine.
By that standard, of course, virtually every building is archi
tecture, so long as its physical form reflects some degree of civiliz
ing intent. The intent may reveal itself in something as modest as
the crude curlicues of the tenement cornice or as intricate and
profound as the stonework and stained glass of Chartres or the
space of Borromini’s extraordinary church of Sant’Ivo in Rome.
Architectural intent is not merely a matter of decoration, though
it can be; it can emerge from the conscious crafting of space,
the deliberate shaping of form, or the juxtaposition of well
considered materials. Art is defined largely by intention, and so is
architecture.
Architecture is balanced, precisely and precariously, between
art and practicality. These needs do not precede art and they do
not follow it; they are not subservient to it and they are not

superior to it. Each aspect of architecture coexists, and every
work of architecture must to a greater or lesser degree take them
all into account. Vitruvius, writing in ancient Rome around
30 bc, set out the three elements of architecture as ‘‘commod
ity, firmness, and delight,’’ and no one has done better than
his tripartite definition, for it cogently sums up the architec
tural paradox: a building must be useful while at the same time it
must be the opposite of useful, since art—delight, in Vitruvian
parlance—by its very essence has no mundane function. And
then, on top of all of that, a building must be constructed accord-
ing to the laws of engineering, which is to say that it must be
built to stand up.
Vitruvius presents these conflicting realities of architecture
not as a paradox but as a matter of coexistence; his point is to
remind us that a building must simultaneously be useful, well
built, and visually appealing. Neither does Vitruvius explicitly
rank the three elements in order of importance. While it can be
pleasing to think of them in ascending significance, this is a
subtle footnote to the real message that Vitruvius conveys, which
is that they are interdependent. Without firmness and delight,
commodity is nothing. But delight needs firmness, not only so
the building stands up, but also so its art can reach its great
est heights. The builders of the Pyramids, the Greek temples,
Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals were all engineers as
much as architects; to them these disciplines were one. So, too,
with Brunelleschi and his Duomo in Florence, or Michelangelo
at St. Peter’s. In our time, the disciplines have diverged, and
engineers are not architects. But every great structure of modern

times, from Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House to Frank Gehry’s
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, is a product of engineers as much
as of architects; without firmness, there will be no delight. All
three elements of architecture are essential.
So architecture is art and it is not art; it is art and it is some
thing more, or less, as the case may be. This is its paradox and its
glory, and always has been: art and not art, at once. Architecture
is not like a painting or a novel or a poem; its role is to provide
shelter, and its reality in the physical world makes it unlike
anything else that we commonly place in the realm of art. Unlike a
symphony, a building must fulfill a certain practical function—
giving us a place to work, or to live, or to shop or to worship or to
be entertained—and it must stand up. But a building is not at all
like other things that we place in the realm of the practical but
that may have aesthetic aspirations, such as an airplane, an auto
mobile, or a cooking pot. For we expect a work of architecture,
when it succeeds in its aesthetic aims, to be capable of creating a
more profound set of feelings than a well-designed toaster.
Sir John Soane’s Museum, the architect’s extraordinary town
house in London—and one of the greatest works by an architect
who was one of the most brilliant and original design forces to
have come out of Georgian London—contains a room that can
make this clear. It was Soane’s breakfast room, and it is fairly
small, with a round table set under a low dome that is not a real
dome but a canopy, supported by narrow columns at four cor
ners. Where the canopy meets the corners, Soane placed small,
round mirrors, so that the occupants of the breakfast table can
see one another without looking directly at each other. The

yellowish walls are lined with bookcases and paintings, and natu
ral light tumbles in softly beside the canopy, indirectly, from
above. Soane liked to create rooms within rooms and spaces that
connect in unusual ways with other spaces, and in the break
fast room you can see that he is doing it not just as the early
nineteenth-century’s version of razzle-dazzle but to provide a
kind of psychic comfort. The dome is protecting, but it is not
quite enclosing, a reminder that while we may feel uncommuni
cative and vulnerable early in the morning, we need to move out
of that stage into the world. The breakfast room functions as a
kind of halfway house, cozy in a way that other, more formal
spaces tend not to be, and soft in the way it introduces us to
the day. It is a room of great beauty and serenity, perfectly bal
anced between openness and enclosure, between public and pri
vate. The British architecture critic Ian Nairn was exaggerating
only somewhat when he called the breakfast room ‘‘probably the
deepest penetration of space and of man’s position in space, and
hence in the world, that any architect has ever created.’’
In the breakfast room, Soane used architecture to fulfill a
routine function and create a powerful, almost transcendent ex
perience at the same time. For me there are other buildings, too,
that achieve the extraordinary as they fulfill a function that, in
and of itself, is perfectly ordinary. In 1929, when Mies van der
Rohe was asked to create a small pavilion to represent Germany
at the world exposition in Barcelona, he produced a sublime
composition of glass, marble, steel, and concrete, arranged to
appear almost as if the elements were flat planes floating in space.
The white, flat roof and the walls of green marble with stainless

Sir John Soane, breakfast room, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
steel columns in front of them combine to have immense sensual

power, a tiny exhibit pavilion in which you feel an entire world of
continuous, floating space, and one of the first modern buildings
anywhere to convey a sense of richness and luxury amid great
restraint—a building that in some ways has more in common, at
least spiritually, with the spare classical architecture of Japan.
The Great Workroom of the Johnson Wax Administration
Building in Racine, Wisconsin, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion
and finished a decade later, in 1939, had an even more mundane

purpose, which was to house clerical employees. Wright created
an enormous, altogether spectacular room of light and swirling
curves under a translucent ceiling. The room was lined in brick
with clerestory windows of translucent Pyrex tubes, and its struc
ture was supported on a forest of slender, tapering columns, each
of which was topped by a huge, round disc, like a lily pad of
concrete floating in the translucent ceiling. The space looks, even
now, like a futurist fantasy; it must have been altogether as
tonishing in the 1930s. While Wright’s specially designed typ
ing chairs and steel worktables were less than functional and
the room, though awash in natural light, allowed no views to
the exterior—this was Frank Lloyd Wright’s world you were in,
and not for an instant would he let you forget it—the Johnson
Wax building still gave typists a modern cathedral, an ennobling
place, in which to work.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Great Workroom, Johnson Wax headquarters,
Racine, Wisconsin
We certainly could not live with constant attention to music and

would surely tune out even the loveliest sounds if we were sur
rounded by them at every moment, as we are by architecture.
Because architecture is omnipresent, it obliges us to stop seeing
it. We cannot take it in constantly at its highest level of intensity,
as we have seen. And yet we cannot not take it in, either. All
architecture, from art at its highest to the architecture that barely
makes it over the threshold of intention, shapes the world in
which we live most of our lives. With one foot necessarily in
the real world, it straddles the gap between reality and dreams.
To be engaged with architecture is to be engaged with almost
everything else as well: culture, society, politics, business, history,
family, religion, education. Every building exists to house some

thing, and what it houses is itself part of the pursuit of architec
ture. The joy of architecture as art is only an aspect of the experi
ence of architecture, profound though it may be; there is also
great satisfaction to understanding the built environment as a
form of engagement with every other function imaginable.
Architecture is social as well as individual: as it exists in physi
cal reality, it exists in social reality, too. Two people can experi
ence a work of architecture as differently as they can experience a
painting or a symphony, but the way architecture enforces social
interaction, imposing a common experience despite the possible
differences in judgment that may result, is unique. It takes many
people to make a work of architecture and many people to use
one. The novel may reach its fullest meaning when read by a
single person, acting alone; but the concert hall or museum or
office building or even private house derives much of its meaning
from the social acts that occur within it and from how its physi
cal form is intricately involved in those social acts. When we see a
concert hall empty, after hours, we can appreciate its physical
form, but we see it as a vacuum, cut off from its purpose, and
thus we barely see it at all. Even a cathedral—which architectural
pilgrims are most likely to visit at quiet times and which may
confer extraordinary gifts of intimacy on the solitary visitor—
rises to yet another level of meaning when we experience it filled
with worshipers.
Architecture is the ultimate physical representation of a cul
ture, more so than even its flag. The White House, the Capi
tol, the Houses of Parliament, the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower,
the Brandenburg Gate, St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Sydney Opera

House, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge. The
list could expand to thousands of structures, and they need not
be celebrated ones; county courthouses and town halls in small
communities everywhere can possess the same qualities and con
vey the same meaning: architecture is a powerful icon because it
represents common experience, more so than any other art, and
resonates more than most other aspects of common cultural
experience. A flag is a relatively simple object whose entire effect
lies in its blunt, direct, and total symbolism, but architecture
functions as a different kind of icon. It is complicated, experi
enced over time, and generally large enough to be perceived in
very different ways by different people, however much they may
share a commitment to its iconic status. Every work of architec
ture, whatever its symbolic associations, also exists as an aesthetic
experience, as pure physical sensation. The White House is four
walls, a portico, some severe Georgian detailing, and some splen
did rooms full of elegant objects and decoration, and while only
a Martian unaware of its history could perceive it only as a pure
object, no one can perceive it only as pure symbol, either. Every
iconic piece of architecture speaks to us simultaneously as both
form and symbol.
When a work of architecture functions as icon, then it matters
in a different kind of way from other buildings. The power of
architectural icons is undiminished today, even as so many other
symbols of our culture appear to weaken. We can see this not
only in the continued magnetic pull of such places as the White
House and the Capitol—a pull that seems undiminished by the
cynicism with which voters regard the occupants of these build

ings and the political events that go on inside them—but also in
the ascension to iconic status of the World Trade Center after its
destruction on September 11, 2001, when tragic circumstances
led the United States to embrace, surely for the first time, an
enormous, modernist, commercial building and confer on it all
of the symbolic meaning that is often reserved for more tradi
tional kinds of architecture. (For years after September 11, side
walk vendors in New York were selling pictures of the World
Trade Center in the way that they once sold pictures of Malcolm
X or Martin Luther King, Jr.) That it took martyrdom to render
the Twin Towers beloved and to make people view them as being
as fundamentally an American symbol as the Lincoln Memorial
is not surprising, of course, not only because Americans have
always had a certain conflict with modernism—we want to be
seen as advanced, indeed as the most advanced culture there is,
but at the same time we have always been most comfortable
keeping one foot in the past, like Jefferson seeking to move
forward by adopting and reinventing what has come before, not
by breaking with tradition. For many Americans, before Septem
ber 11, Colonial Williamsburg probably felt like a more natural
symbol of the country than did a very tall box of glass and steel.
The risks of breaking with history were clear in the saga sur
rounding another important icon, the work of architecture that is
probably the first modernist civic monument to achieve any de-
gree of iconic status in the United States: the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington, D.C., by Maya Lin, completed in 1981.
This is also worth discussing in detail, since it is an extraordinary
story, and not only because Lin was a twenty-one-year-old student

when she designed it. When the jury of an architectural compe-
tition selected Lin’s design—a pair of two-hundred-foot-long
black granite walls that join to form a V which embraces a gen-
tly sloping plot of ground—what troubled many people was not
Lin’s age but her reliance on abstraction. Where were the
statues, where were the traditional symbols? The fact that Lin
proposed to give the memorial a sense of immediacy and connec
tion to the dead by carving the names of all 57,692 Americans
who were killed in Vietnam from 1963 to 1973 into the granite
did not seem, to some people, sufficient to remove it from what
they considered the realm of cold, impersonal abstraction. The
project went ahead only after a compromise led to the addition
of a statue of soldiers and a flagpole at some distance from
the wall. But once the memorial was built, it turned out to be
Lin’s original design—the wall of names—that possesses the real
emotional power, not the mawkish, literalizing elements added
for fear the wall would not speak clearly enough. The latter
have turned out to be superfluous to the original design, which
appears to speak more clearly to great numbers of people than
any other abstract work in the United States today.
By traditional measures the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not
architecture at all—it has no roof, no doors, no interior. It does
not pretend to be a building. But it employs the techniques of
architecture to what can only be called the highest and most
noble civic purpose, and does so more successfully than almost
anything else built in our age. Indeed, it stands, quite simply, as
the most important evidence the late twentieth century pro
duced that design can still serve as a unifying social force.

Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C.
At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, monumentality creates a
true public realm, public not only in the sense of ownership but
also in that of intellectual and emotional connection. The me
morial is public, people feel, because it is about them, and its
physical form touches their souls. This memorial has the power
to move people of startlingly different backgrounds and political
views, and it performs this difficult task of making common
experience when society seems infinitely fragmented. This work
of architecture provides common ground.
The wide V shape of the wall is subtly sited: one arm of the
wall points toward the Washington Monument, the other to the
Lincoln Memorial, tying the memorial—and by implication
the tragedy of Vietnam—to the landmarks of official Washing-
ton, and hence to the epic of our history. The memorial is not
conspicuous from afar, since it does not rise much above ground
level at all: it may be one of the few great architectural works
anywhere whose approach is marked only by directional signs,
not by a glimpse of the thing itself. You approach through the
Mall, the monumental axial green space of Washington, which
recedes into the background as the wall becomes visible, just a
sliver at first, and then larger. It is not huge, and at the begin-
ning, where it is just a thin slice of granite connected to the
ground, it seems tiny. As you walk beside it and the ground de-
scends, the wall grows in height; more and more names of the
dead appear, chronologically listed, until suddenly the wall be-
gins to loom large and there is a sense that you have gone deeper
into the abyss of war as you descend further into the ground
and Washington itself disappears. Then, as you turn the corner

at the center of the memorial, you begin to move slowly back
upward again, toward the light, the sun, and the city—and you
realize that, metaphorically at least, you have undergone a pas-
sage toward redemption.
Literal honor to the dead through the presence of their names;
metaphorical representation of the war as a descent from which
the nation rose again; symbolic connections to the larger world.
What more could we ask? There is beauty here, and room for
each of us to think our own thoughts, and the brilliance of a de-
sign that reminds us at every moment that private loss and public
tragedy are irrevocably joined.
Monuments as powerful, as subtle, and as successful at appealing

to a wide range of people as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are
rare in any period. All buildings have some symbolic meaning,
however, even if it is more conventional and more common than
the symbolism of a great memorial, and the question worth ask-
ing is how effectively does a piece of architecture carry out its
symbolic role—how well does it communicate whatever message
it may have that goes beyond the purely functional, beyond even
the aesthetic appeal of its physical form? Frank Lloyd Wright, for
all his determination to reinvent the form of the single-family
house, was passionately devoted to the very traditional idea of
the house as a symbol of the nuclear family, and almost all of his
houses had large fireplaces, either as the dominant elements of the
main living space or set off in inglenooks of their own, all to em-
phasize the connection between home and hearth. (Wright liked
to present himself as a radical outsider, but he was less interested

in changing society than in changing architecture, and he tend-
ed to believe that the best way to keep the American agrarian,
family tradition strong was to house it in a new architectural
form created specifically for the American continent rather than
transported from elsewhere. It was a case of radical art for a more
conservative end than Wright wanted people to believe.)
Think, for a moment, about another of the most common
building types, the bank. Once, most American banks tended to
be serious, classically inspired buildings, civic presences sym
bolizing both the stature of the bank in a community and protec
tion for the hoard of cash within. Who would doubt that their
money is safer in a limestone temple or an Italian Renaissance
palazzo than in a storefront? Traditional architectural style served
a powerful symbolic purpose here, in the same way it always has
in religious buildings.
Today, banks are vast national or international corporate en
terprises, not local ones, and most cash exists electronically. How
do you create an architectural expression for the protection of
blips on a computer screen? Surely not by building a replica of a
Greek temple on Main Street. And cash itself now is generally
dispensed not from a bank vault but from an ATM, a vending
machine device that demands no architectural expression at all,
save for a wall onto which it can be installed.
I mention all of this not to say what banks should or should
not look like, and certainly not to deny that there is still great
symbolic power present in some of the fine old banks that pre
vious generations have handed down to us, but to underscore
how social and technological change affects architectural mean

ing. A grand and sumptuous classical bank may still give pleasure
as a monumental artifact, but that is about all; customers in it
today are not likely to feel the sense of protection that the build
ing was intended to give, largely because they no longer need or
seek such protection in an age of electronic banking. We may
even feel a greater sense of emotion in experiencing the glory
of an old bank as a piece of monumental architecture than pre-
vious generations did in experiencing it as a place of safety and
security—but that is beside the point. Even if we find the old
bank exhilarating, it has a different meaning as a work of archi
tecture now than before. (And it often has a very different func
tion, too. In New York, several of the city’s finest old banks have
been converted into catering halls, party spaces which under
score that the buildings now exist for pleasure, not necessity.)
So how, then, does one design a bank today? The ‘‘icon,’’ or
symbol on the computer screen, that Microsoft Money uses to
denote that its online banking system is working is a line moving
back and forth between a miniature house and a miniature classi
cal temple—data being transferred from home to bank, or vice
versa. No one looking at such a screen could doubt what those
icons represent, and they stand as confirmation that the symbolic
power of the classical bank remains a part of collective memory,
and hence still has practical application, even in an age in which
the traditional function of the bank has changed altogether.
But is this a sign of weakness or of strength? Does the fact that
the classical bank has been reduced to the status of an icon on a
computer screen confirm its continued vitality as a symbol or
make it no more than a cartoon? Something of both, I suspect.

But what the computer icon really proves is that our age has not
yet been able to create any architectural image for the bank that
is nearly as potent as the traditional one. We still use the classical
bank when we need to create an image that says ‘‘bank,’’ even
though we do not use the classical bank much any more when we
want to make a real bank because it has so little connection to the
realities of how banking is done.
Occasionally banks are built today that self-consciously evoke
the monumental grandeur of the old classical ones. But their
designs, however well meaning, cannot be the same as the ones
that have survived from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, for classical banks built in an age of cyberspace be
come, in effect, exercises in nostalgia. They do not emerge from
the conditions that gave birth to the great bank buildings of the
past, when cash needed physical protection and society under
stood and respected the idea that a bank was the architectural
expression of that act of protection. Today, building that kind of
old-fashioned bank may represent an earnest yearning for that
time, but it is unlikely to be convincing in the way that a sur-
viving older bank is. Yearning is rarely enough to confer archi
tectural meaning on its own, which is why such buildings often
end up as three-dimensional versions of the computer icon—
cartoons built of stone.
This is not to deny the complexity of the problem of creating a
decent, appealing architecture that expresses the conditions of
the moment. When banking is less and less a matter of tangible
goods—that is, cash—it is less and less easy to give it meaning-
ful architectural representation. Not for nothing have even

great banking institutions come to look more and more like offices
and branch banks more like storefronts, and even the ones that
work reasonably well have given up on almost any level of architec-
tural ambition. Of course, this is fitting symbolism in itself: the
reality is a certain banality, much as the great architectural critic
Lewis Mumford noted half a century ago when he reviewed the
United Nations headquarters and observed that the most con-
spicuous element of the complex was not a tower or an assembly
hall but the Secretariat skyscraper, a perfect symbol, Mumford
said, of the triumph of the bureaucracy. So, too, are banks as
storefront offices and ATMs perfect symbols of the evolution of
banking away from the real—cash—and to the virtual world of
electronic transactions.
When Vitruvius, writing in ancient Rome, dictated that archi

tecture should provide ‘‘commodity, firmness, and delight,’’ he
also said that architecture was, in effect, the beginning of civi
lization and that all other arts and fields of study connected to
it and were descended from it—an observation that, as archi
tectural historian Fil Hearn wrote in Ideas That Shaped Buildings,
‘‘offered the art of building perhaps the highest encomium it
has ever received,’’ rendering the architect, in effect, the keeper
of civilization. (Vitruvius’s work consisted of ten sections and
included long discussions about the classical orders, about the
proper way to build temples, amphitheaters, and houses, and
about materials and the siting of cities.)
But if Vitruvius can be considered the beginning, or the foun
dation, of architectural theory, it was a foundation with not

much built upon it for more than fifteen hundred years. In the
Middle Ages, great engineer-architects built some of the most
extraordinary structures that have ever existed, but they did not
codify their ideas into long treatises, as Vitruvius had done. The
notion that one could prescribe in words an ideal way of build
ing, and a purpose for architecture, returned in the Renaissance,
when Vitruvius was rediscovered and used as a model for an
updated treatise by Leon Battista Alberti in the middle of the
fifteenth century. Alberti urged a return to a classical architecture
based on the buildings of ancient Rome, not just because he
found classicism aesthetically appealing, but because he believed
that in building correctly lay virtue. ‘‘A lberti felt impelled to cite
the benefits to society of beautiful, well-planned buildings: they
give pleasure; they enhance civic pride; they confer dignity and
honor on the community; if sacred, they encourage piety; and
they may even move an enemy to refrain from damaging them,’’
Fil Hearn has written, noting that Alberti also observed that the
architect had the potential to affect national security as much as a
general and to improve his country as much as an artist. Alberti
seems to have had as pure and natural an understanding of the
balance between aesthetics and practical, not to say political,
matters as any architect ever has. He celebrated the artistic side of
architecture and claimed that architecture owed more to paint
ing than to anything else. Yet he ranked mathematics as nearly as
important and proposed precise, mathematical explanations of
proportion. And he understood the relation between architec
ture and power as clearly as Machiavelli.

It is hard to overestimate Alberti’s importance. In an essay in
the New York Review, the art historian Joseph Connors summed
up Alberti with precision and elegance, writing that out of his
‘‘mixture of erudition, logic and experience came prescient ideas
that would transform architecture. Beauty is not the same as
ornament. The beautiful is that which cannot be changed except
for the worse; a beautiful building is one to which nothing can be
added and from which nothing can be taken away. Modest mate
rials arranged in proportionate relationships are more likely to be
beautiful than rich materials badly arranged. The eye can per
ceive harmony just like the ear. Churches should be austere and
dark; shadows induce a sense of sacred fear and the finest orna
ment in a place of worship is a flame. Palace planning should
reflect degrees of distance between the ruler and his subjects. The
house is like a small city, and the city a large house. Nature
delights in the measure and the mean, and so should the archi
tect. Beauty has the power to disarm the raging barbarian; there
is no greater security against violence and injury than beauty and
dignity.’’
Alberti may have erred on the side of earnestness, not to say
naïveté, in his confidence that architectural beauty could pro-
tect a civilization—his Machiavellian pragmatism seems to have
been limited to the process of making buildings, not to their
effects. Still, I am not sure there has ever been a more elegant
and concise set of architectural directions. Alberti’s writing
inspired numerous other odes to classicism, most famously
the Four Books of Architecture, by Andrea Palladio, the great

s ixteenth-century builder of Italian country villas. Palladio pre-
sented his own work as evidence of his theoretical ideas, thus
beginning the practice of architects writing books in which they
attempt to articulate ideal ways of building and then show their
own buildings, presumably as a demonstration of these ideal
notions. Palladio’s treatise was as important as his buildings in
establishing him as a central figure in Western architecture and
in giving us the adjective ‘‘Palladian’’ to attach to a certain kind
of symmetrical, classically inspired villa, generally with a pedi-
mented temple front.
The notion that there is a right way to build—morally and
ethically, that is, not structurally—is really the basis of most
architectural theory that has followed. In England, A. W. N.
Pugin in the 1830s and 1840s argued that Gothic, not classi-
cal, architecture was the road to civic good, social virtue, and,
most important, godliness. For Pugin, an intense Roman Cath-
olic, Gothic was the only true religious architecture, period.
He worked with Charles Barry, the architect of the Houses of
Parliament, and designed most of the interiors and much of the
architectural detail in Parliament, but beyond working on this
building and designing a few of his own, Pugin played a major
role as a theorist in creating the Gothic Revival. It is no exagger-
ation to say that the close connection between the Gothic style
and churches that still exists today is due in large part to forces
Pugin helped set in motion. (Say ‘‘church,’’ and it is highly likely
that something at least loosely resembling Gothic architecture
will come into your mind.) Pugin was aided by John Ruskin,
whose long treatises The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The

Stones of Venice, surely the most ambitious architectural writing
since Palladio, extended the argument beyond architecture’s in-
fluence over what we might call the external morality of society
into the idea that there is also a morality within a structure itself.
Ruskin said that Gothic architecture, by virtue of the fact that it
was honest, clear, and direct in its use of structure and materials,
had a whole other kind of morality to it, beyond that conferred
by its traditions and its close connection to the church. Nature,
Ruskin thought, provided the proper model for building. ‘‘An
architect should live as little in our cities as a painter,’’ Ruskin
wrote. ‘‘Send him to our hills, and let him study there what na-
ture understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.’’ To Ruskin,
not only structure but every material used in building had its own
integrity, which dictated how it should be properly used, a no-
tion that would come to be particularly important to modernist
architects. He disliked surface decoration and argued for plain,
workaday buildings for ordinary purposes, and he believed that
real a rchitecture—which is to say Gothic-style a rchitecture—
should be reserved for noble, civic, or sacred purpose.
Most buildings, of course, were not designed to demonstrate
theories, and in the late nineteenth century, many architects who
designed Gothic-style buildings did so because they were the
fashion, and that was enough. The concept that there was some
sort of moral integrity to ‘‘honest’’ structure did not hold water
with most architects, and all kinds of buildings were produced in
all kinds of styles, many of the best of them having noth-
ing whatsoever to do with these ideas. Decoration, harmonious
proportions, comfortable scale were all notions that were only

occasionally connected to structural honesty, but to many archi-
tects, they meant a lot more. The architect and critic Russell
Sturgis wrote that the typical public building was designed to be
‘‘a box with a pretty inside, put into another box with a pretty out-
side,’’ and never mind any rational connection between the two.
Still, Ruskin’s writing had considerable influence. It led directly
to what became known as the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain,
led by William Morris, which called for a revival of craftsman
ship, something it saw as closely connected to the principles of
honesty and directness that Ruskin believed gave buildings in
tegrity. Ruskin’s notion that there is such a thing as a building
itself being moral or inherently honest was picked up by Eugène-
Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, a French theorist who carried it still
further and argued that architecture had an obligation to be
rational. Viollet-le-Duc, too, was taken by Gothic architecture
and saw honesty rather than mystery in it. His case for structural
rationality set out the beginning tenets of what would become
the underlying argument of almost every modern architect.
Some, like the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, whose most
famous essay was called ‘‘Ornament and Crime,’’ took Viollet-le
Duc’s theory to the next level and put the issue of moral-
ity back on the table. Decoration was not only misguided and
old-fashioned, Loos said, it was immoral, and he argued for an
austere architecture as the only form of design suitable to the
modern age. The great French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, in
Towards a New Architecture and When the Cathedrals Were White,
as well as the Italian futurist Antonio Sant’Elia and the German
architect Walter Gropius, saw the machine as the great inspira

tion of the age and urged architects to follow it, not by mak
ing their designs literally machinelike, but by giving them the
directness and lack of extraneous elements that characterized
machines. They were not troubled by the fact that the notion
that a building had an obligation to be direct and clear in its
structure—to reveal itself, so to speak, rather than to hide itself
behind the clutter of decoration—had actually emerged out of
the architectural theory of Gothicists like Ruskin and Viollet-le
Duc and was not in and of itself an argument for designing
buildings that would not look like anything that had come be
fore. But it became one, as modernists used these notions to
create a rationale for rejecting history and designing as if with
a clean slate. Sigfried Giedion would attempt to give all of this
further justification in his epic work Space, Time and Architec
ture: The Growth of a New Tradition, published in 1941, which
argued that a cool, austere, somewhat abstract modernism was
the culmination of the history of Western architecture. To Gie
dion, the architectural past was, quite literally, prologue, and he
saw architectural history as a straight line pointing inevitably
toward the modernist architecture of the twentieth century.
Curiously, Frank Lloyd Wright, who would ultimately be
identified more with his claims that the flowing, open, horizon
tal space of his ‘‘Prairie Houses’’ and other buildings represented
the expression of a quintessentially American impulse, also made
similar arguments about the machine, and even before the Euro
peans did. In a remarkable lecture called ‘‘The Art and Craft of
the Machine,’’ delivered at Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chi
cago in 1901, Wright talked about Gutenberg, the inventor of

movable type, and made the extraordinary observation that the
printed book was, in a sense, the first machine and that its arrival
profoundly changed architecture. It was not the printing press
itself that Wright was calling a machine, it was the book. He
owed, and acknowledged, a certain debt in this point, of course,
to Victor Hugo, who made a somewhat similar observation in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but Wright’s way of expressing
this point was very much his own. Before printed books, Wright
said, ‘‘all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one
point—architecture. Down to the fifteenth century the chief reg
ister of humanity is architecture.’’ Wright referred to the most
important pieces of architecture as ‘‘great granite books’’ and said
that ‘‘down to the time of Gutenberg architecture is the principal
writing—the universal writing of humanity.’’ But with the arrival
of printing, Wright said, ‘‘Human thought discovers a mode of
perpetuating itself still more simple and easy. Architecture is
dethroned. Gutenberg’s letters of lead are about to supersede
Orpheus’s letters of stone. The book is about to kill the edifice,’’
he concluded, here reworking Hugo’s phrase literally.
Wright’s theory ignores the oral tradition of literature, which
allowed words to become part of cultural history even before the
invention of the printing press. Like almost everything Wright
wrote, this lecture is wildly overstated, full of Whitmanesque
hyperbole. But for all of that, it remains an astonishing observa
tion, for in a way it is the beginning of the modern connection
between media and architecture. Wright was acting on the pre
sumption that architecture was a form of communication, a
radical thought indeed for 1901—architecture as media. ‘‘The Art

and Craft of the Machine,’’ then, can be viewed as an early
example—perhaps the early example—of the notion of architec
ture as media, which today, when we think of almost everything
in terms of its implications for information technology, is as
tonishing. Wright was viewing architecture as a system by which
the culture preserved and extended itself—in fact, as the primary
system by which the culture did this, since Wright saw art and
sculpture as subsidiary to architecture, as merely tools in its arse
nal of communication. Sometimes buildings literally did tell
stories (the iconography of the Gothic cathedrals is the most
potent example), although I imagine Wright was thinking not
only in such literal terms but also about the architectural expe
rience itself, as well as about the notion that the creation of
structure and space was a form of communication and a way of
conveying cultural values between the generations. Now, as I
said, architecture was not the only system of preserving culture,
as Wright would have had us believe, but there is no question
that it was a very powerful one, and Wright’s notion that the
power of architecture was diminished by the way in which the
printing press allowed an alternative means for ideas to become
widely disseminated stands as an extraordinary moment in the
evolution of thinking about the purpose of architecture.
Wright went on to say that architecture had been so weakened
by the invention of the printing press that architects felt there
was little to do beyond copying the styles of the past and that
only now, with the coming of modern architecture, was the field
of architecture in a position to resume its former role as a central
pursuit in society. Wright’s notion that everything between the

Gothic cathedrals and the twentieth century was an architectural
wasteland is absurd, of course. But he did identify an issue that
remains as sharp a sign of division today as ever, which is the
question of how important it is for architects to invent some
thing new, and that even if you do not consider reusing an
architectural style from the past to be immoral, as Wright and
the other modernists did, is it nevertheless a lesser pursuit than
designing something new and different? Is there such a thing as a
‘‘style for the time,’’ as modernists liked to say?
Most architectural theories of modern times, as throughout
history, have been attempts to justify a particular style. Ruskin,
Morris, and Wright, for all they talked of architecture as being
determined by moral principles and of its critical role as an
exemplar of society’s aims, were no exceptions. Aesthetics, and
the wish that buildings look a particular way, almost always
provided the underlying, if sometimes unspoken, rationale be
hind architectural theory. Ruskin all but admitted this when he
said, ‘‘Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell
you what you are.’’
But if we are thinking about what architecture means in our
culture, the discussion cannot begin and end with aesthetics.
What of the purpose of architecture in solving social problems,
in housing the poor, in creating civilized environments for teach
ing and learning? Don’t architects have a responsibility to make
the world better, as Vitruvius and Alberti would remind us? Does
an ugly public housing project that provides a home for fifty fam-
ilies not serve a larger purpose than a more attractive one that
gives only twenty families a roof over their heads? Wasn’t it the

job of architects to try and solve the problem of rebuilding New
Orleans after Hurricane Katrina?
The answer is yes, and no. When the professional expertise of
architects can provide answers to social problems that would
otherwise not be found, as in creating attractive, buildable, af
fordable housing in New Orleans, or in designing viable tempo
rary housing after an earthquake, or in figuring out a way to lay
out a school or a hospital to maximize the satisfaction it will give
to the people who use it, then architecture is fulfilling a social
responsibility. But architects are not makers of public policy, and
while they can design whatever they please, they can build only
what a client wants to pay for. It is not the architect’s role to solve
the problem of housing the poor. It is the architect’s role to give
the poor the very best housing possible when society decides that
it is ready to address this urgent problem. The same applies for
education and health care and every other social need that can be
satisfied, in part, by more and better buildings: it is the job of
architects to design the best buildings, the most beautiful and
civilized and useful ones, but society must be willing to address
these problems before the architect can do his or her best work.
In Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Robert Venturi’s
seminal work of theory, published in 1966—a book that is preoc
cupied primarily with aesthetics and is a potent and eloquent
attack on the stark simplicity of much modernist architecture—
Venturi took note of the rising tide of demands in the 1960s that
architects assume a broader role. ‘‘The architect’s ever diminish
ing power and his growing ineffectualness in shaping the whole
environment can perhaps be reversed, ironically, by narrowing

his concerns and concentrating on his own job,’’ Venturi wrote.
His point was that the best way for an architect to fulfill his or
her social responsibility is simply to build better buildings.
No one would deny that, but is it enough? Today, there is
more public interest in new architecture than ever, and as we
build museums, performing arts centers, academic buildings,
and houses as one-of-a-kind, special monuments, it is easy to
think of architecture only as an elaborately wrought physical
object—as pure form—and not as a structure created to make a
social statement of some kind. Architecture can, after all, pro
vide a model for a way to live, or be a source of solutions to
social problems. Karsten Harries, a contemporary philosopher
with a particular interest in art and architecture, took some issue
with the extent to which we, as a society, seem in thrall to eye
grabbing architecture in his book The Ethical Function of Archi
tecture, which did not reject aesthetics so much as try to broaden
the discussion. Architecture is too obsessed with form for its
own sake, Harries argued. Architecture matters because it has re
sponsibilities to society that are far broader than the making of
even the most beautiful forms and shapes. To Harries, Nikolaus
Pevsner’s famous line about Lincoln Cathedral and the bicycle
shed was wrong, not so much because it created a falsely simple
distinction between architecture and building, but because its
underlying rationale was limited to the way a building looked.
Architecture, Harries wrote, ‘‘has to free itself from the aesthetic
approach, which also means freeing itself from an understand
ing of the work of architecture as fundamentally just a deco
rated shed.’’

The aesthetic approach can also give architecture a hermetic
quality, in which architecture becomes directed less to social
needs than toward theoretical ideas and pure form. Architectural
theory is capable of being a profound quest, but architecture is
not, in the end, philosophical. There is always room for architec
ture that comments on other architecture and for architecture
that is created mainly to promulgate an idea about architecture.
But finally architecture is not about itself. As I said at the begin
ning of this chapter, it is about everything else. It is never a
neutral envelope. It is always made to contain something, and to
understand architecture fully you have to understand more than
architecture. You have to understand something about what is
going to be contained within a building, whether it is theater or
medicine or high finance or baseball. You don’t have to be able to
conduct Mass to design a Catholic church or be able to direct
Hamlet to design a theater, but if you have no interest whatsoever
in the act of worship or the art of the theater, something impor
tant is likely to be lost. You don’t need to be Derek Jeter to design
a baseball park, but if you do not understand the game and know
what it is like to sit for nine innings in what A. Bartlett Giamatti,
the former Yale president turned baseball commissioner, once
called ‘‘that simulacrum of a city . . . a green expanse, complete
and coherent, shimmering,’’ then you will not be able to design a
baseball park as it should be. This is much more than a matter of
providing commodity in the Vitruvian sense, much more than
making sure that a building functions well on a practical level.
Architecture exists to enable other things, and it is enriched by
its intimate connection to those other things. To study school

buildings is, in part, to study education; to study hospitals is, in
part, to study medicine. The tie between architecture and the
things it contains makes architecture different from anything
else. Nothing else, you could say, is about everything.
Still, architecture is art, and as I will argue in the rest of this
book, in the final analysis we cannot not view it through an
aesthetic lens. But of course architecture also is not art. Karsten
Harries proposed what he called the ethical approach to architec
ture in response to this paradox and as the alternative to the
temptation to view architecture purely as aesthetics. An ethical
approach to architecture, he said, should show us our place in the
world and, Harries wrote, paraphrasing an idea put forth a gen
eration earlier by Sigfried Giedion, ‘‘should speak to us of how
we are to live in the contemporary world.’’ Such architecture is
invariably public, not private, and as such, it makes a statement
about the importance of community; it is common ground, and
it inspires us. ‘‘A rchitecture has an ethical function in that it calls
us out of the everyday, recalls us to the values presiding over our
lives as members of a society; it beckons us toward a better life, a
bit closer to the ideal,’’ Harries wrote. ‘‘One task of architecture
is to preserve at least a piece of utopia, and inevitably such a piece
leaves and should leave a sting, awaken utopian longings, fill us
with dreams of another and better world.’’
I like Harries’s notion of an ethical architecture, since it seems
to say implicitly that even though architecture is an aesthetic ex
perience, it is not in the same category as art and music. Rather,
it is a way of providing something we absolutely need, and not
a luxury that we can afford to give up in the face of stress and

difficulty. Indeed, you could argue that an ethical architecture
is more essential, not less essential, in times of difficulty, that it
can rise to its greatest potential and be a symbol of what we want
and what we aspire to, as so few other things can. It is not for
nothing that Abraham Lincoln insisted that the building of the
great dome of the Capitol continue during the Civil War, even
though manpower was scarce and money scarcer still; he knew
that the rising dome was a symbol of the nation coming together
and that no words could have the same effect on the psyche of the
country that the physical reality of this building could. Lincoln
knew, I suspect, that even the most eloquent words would not
be present and in front of us all the time, the way the building
would be. And Lincoln knew also that there was value in making
new symbols as well as in preserving older ones and that building
the dome was a way of affirming a belief in the future.
It is hard to think of a more ethical approach to architecture
than that. We build, in the end, because we believe in a future—
nothing shows commitment to the future like architecture. And
we build well because we believe in a better future, because we
believe that there are few greater gifts we can give the generations
that will follow us than great works of architecture, both as a
symbol of our aspirations of community and as a symbol of our
belief not only in the power of imagination but in the ability of
society to continue to create anew. The case for architecture, if
we are going to call it that, doesn’t rest solely on the experience
of being in remarkable and wonderful buildings—those places
that, as Lewis Mumford once put it, ‘‘take your breath away with
the experience of seeing form and space joyfully mastered.’’ But

those are the great moments of architecture, those moments that
take the breath away, and they are the most important ones, the
ones that make civilization. They are our cathedrals, both liter
ally and figuratively, the works of architecture that add to our
culture the way that works by Beethoven or Picasso add to our
culture. To strive to make more of them is in its way an ethical
as well as an aesthetic goal, because it is a sign that we believe
our greatest places are still to be made and our greatest times are
still to come.
Let me conclude this chapter with a discussion of another place

that represents both the highest potential of architecture as sym-
bol and its greatest danger: Thomas Jefferson’s original campus
for the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, completed in
1825. In the first edition of this book, I called it “perhaps the
building where, at least in the United States, architectural form
and symbol come together with more serene grace than in any
other.” I still consider Jefferson’s composition to be among the
greatest works of architecture in the world, but I am not sure that
I can look at it as I once did now that I have read the remark-
able new history of the campus, Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at
Thomas Jefferson’s University, a collection of essays published in
2019, which explains that not only was the campus constructed
largely by slave labor but also that many of Jefferson’s design ele-
ments were specifically intended to accommodate to the presence
of the enslaved people who were necessary for the ongoing oper-
ation of the campus. And much of the serenity of the present-day
campus is the result of the removal of a number of early build-

Thomas Jefferson, the Lawn, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
ings, many of them undistinguished, that were erected to give

slaves places in which to live and work.
I will come back to the complex history of this campus. For
now, let’s start with a brief description of what I and so many
other architecture historians have found alluring: the way in
which Jefferson conceived of the university as an “academical
village” that would be a living lesson in classicism. Designed
when he was seventy-four, the campus consists of two parallel
rows of five classical houses, called pavilions, connected by low,
colonnaded walkways, which face each other across a wide, mag-
nificently proportioned grassy lawn. At the head of the lawn,
presiding over the entire composition, is the Rotunda, a domed
structure Jefferson based on the Pantheon in Rome.

Each pavilion is designed according to a different classical mo-
tif, so that together they constitute a virtual education in classical
architecture: the directness and simplicity of the Doric order,
the richness of the Corinthian, can here be compared in what
amounts to a Jeffersonian fugue of classical variations. As Jeffer-
son conceived it, the Rotunda served as the library, which was
another piece of symbolism, for it turned the form used to honor
the ancient gods into a temple of the book and then gave that
temple pride of place in the composition.
It is not a great stretch to think of the pavilions, with their
stylistic range, as standing as a kind of beginning of the Ameri-
can tendency to pick and choose from history, shaping the styles
of the past to our own purposes. Yet another appealing piece of
symbolism is the way in which the pavilions (which originally
housed the faculty) and the student rooms, set behind them in
buildings called hotels, are connected by colonnaded walkways,
which meant that the university lived together as a community—
albeit, of course, a community with social divisions more akin to
those of a plantation than of an academic institution.
There is a magnificent sense of balance between the built world
and the natural one, between past and present, between order
and freedom—visual freedom, that is, as exemplified by the
wide-open lawn and how it plays off against the ordered build-
ings that enclose and define it. Neither the buildings nor the lawn
would have any meaning without the other, and the dialogue
they enter into is a sublime composition.
The lawn is terraced, so that it steps down gradually as it moves
away from the Rotunda, adding a whole other rhythm to the

composition. The lawn is a room, and the sky its ceiling; I know
of few other outdoor places anywhere where the sense of archi-
tectural space can be so intensely felt.
Before we leave the matter of aesthetics entirely, it is worth
saying that in Jefferson’s buildings there are other kinds of bal-
ances as well—between the icy coolness of the white-painted
stone and the warm redness of the brick, between the sumptu-
ousness of the Corinthian order and the restraint of the Doric,
between the sense of enclosure of the buildings and the sense of
expanse beyond, which in Jefferson’s original design was open to
the west, as if to beckon the educated to go forth and explore the
world. That aspect was severely compromised in 1895 when Stan-
ford White placed a building at the far end of the lawn, turning
the open space into more of a vast cloister, a much more conven-
tional metaphor for education. Still, the rhythms of the columns,
marching on down the lawn, and the masses of the pavilions tug
at your heart in the late afternoon light, when you feel that you
can touch the rays of the sun, dancing on those columns, making
the brick soft and rich. There is awesome beauty here, but also
utter clarity. It becomes clear that Jefferson created both a sub-
lime composition and a remarkably literal expression of an idea.
The idea was that of a liberal education focused on the clas-
sics and not connected to the church, as so many of the first
American colleges were, but open to the world. That this liberal
education in Jefferson’s day and for generations thereafter was
available only to white males surely compromises Jefferson’s hu-
manistic instinct, reminding us that the sense of freedom that
the lawn exudes is a visual freedom, not a political one. It did

not apply to everyone, any more than Jefferson’s great words in
the Declaration of Independence applied to everyone. It is the
directness of the buildings’ connection to slavery, however, that
truly challenges us, and forces us to see things in a different way
from what Jefferson intended.
We see two new things when we know the full history of this
campus. The first are the enslaved workers, whose labor built this
shrine and made it possible. Knowing that it was built by the
forced labor of people whose children would never be permit-
ted to attend it does not invalidate the aesthetic beauty of the
campus—great structures from the pyramids to the White House
were built by slaves—but it inevitably affects the purity of the aes-
thetic experience and makes it difficult to see the buildings as Jef-
ferson had wanted us to, either as pure form or as clear metaphor.
No building is ever completely divorced from its social and
political context, as I have said. Aesthetics does not exist in a
vacuum. But the extent to which the social and political context
of a work of architecture affects our perception of it can vary con-
siderably from one building to another, not to mention from one
person to another and from one time to another. Every situation
is different. But the University of Virginia presents a particularly
troubling problem, given the severity with which the beauty of
its design and the elegance of its symbolism clash with the cru-
elty of its early history. When that history was little understood
and willfully ignored, the beauty of the campus was easy to feel.
Now, in a time riven by the whole question of the role of slavery
in American history, it is natural to respond differently to this
architecture. The realities of slavery keep getting in the way.

And they did, quite literally, get in the way for the first de-
cades of the university’s existence—this is the second new thing
that we see, and the one that in some ways has an even greater
impact on our perception than the fact that the university was
built by enslaved people. The university used slave labor not just
in construction, but in almost every phase of its operation other
than teaching. Slaves cleaned, they grew food, they cooked it
and they served it; they washed clothes and emptied privies.
While Jefferson tried, as he had at Monticello, to restrict them to
specific areas, including dark basements beneath his elegant pa-
vilions, the university was too vast an operation to allow them to
be invisible; it needed multiple kitchens, smokehouses, pantries,
laundries, agricultural fields, livestock pens, and workshops,
many of which were built-in structures not nearly as handsome
as the ones Jefferson gave the faculty and students, and many of
which were placed in the areas between the pavilions and the
hotels that for most of the university’s history have been lovely
gardens. Not the least of the important discoveries of recent
scholarship about the University of Virginia is how much it once
had a vast “back of house,” a whole series of service areas pop-
ulated by enslaved people that made Jefferson’s composition far
less genteel than either he or most historians would have had us
believe. Much of its gentility is the creation of a later period.
So, is this an ethical piece of architecture, or not? It has both
an ethical premise, liberal education, and an unethical begin-
ning, as a complex constructed and operated by forced labor. It
is not wrong to treat it with ambiguity; indeed, it would be dif-
ficult not to. We cannot deny the brilliance with which Jefferson

crafted beautiful forms that made the architecture of the uni-
versity not just a container for learning but also a lesson in the
humanistic tradition he wanted to impart. But neither can we
deny the injustice of the system that built Jefferson’s masterpiece
and maintained it, and for generations sought to tidy it up with
gardens in the hope of obliterating its history of cruelty.
The complex and ambiguous history of the University of
Virginia reminds us of something else, too, which is that archi-
tecture has always represented power, for it takes power—and
money—to build. But architecture’s legacy is not power alone; it
is form and space, and the impact that form and space have on us.
Today, talking in terms of form and space may seem evasive,
an abstraction, a way of not calling power to account. It is not.
It is true that power and politics still have their way with us,
and we have not enough housing, not enough roofs over heads.
If architecture is what buildings do beyond keeping us out of
the rain, as I said at the beginning of this book, it is natural to
ask how much it still matters when not enough people are being
protected from the rain.
The answer, as always with art, is to remember that it is not
bread, and it is not justice. It is enrichment and meaning. Ar-
chitecture is different from music and literature and painting
in that it has practical necessity, even urgency; we all need to be
housed, as we all need to be fed. Some people are lucky enough to
be housed in buildings that bring pleasure and meaning as well
as shelter. But everyone can experience the emotional impact of
great architecture, and the satisfaction of architecture that nur-
tures. It is part of our cultural legacy, and it belongs to us all.

afterword: architecture, power, and pleasure
In the Introduction to this book, written in 2009 for the orig-

inal edition, I explained that it would not give a great deal of
attention to sustainability, technology, the real estate industry,
the economics of building, and political questions such as hous-
ing policy, zoning laws, and the relationship of social justice to
architecture. This was not because I don’t think that these things
matter—I hope I made it clear how much they do matter—but
rather because I felt that to address these issues properly would be
to take on a very different set of concerns from the ones I sought
to tackle in Why Architecture Matters, which I would describe
as helping readers to understand and appreciate architecture as
art, and to relate to buildings on both an emotional level and an
intellectual one.
My intention, in short, was to help readers experience archi-
tecture, and to help them to see. That goal has not changed in
this new edition, and the pleasures of architecture are no less ex-
hilarating now than they were when this book was first written.
Still, the passage of a dozen years, and the challenges we face in
the second and third decades of the twenty-first century, seem
to call for further comments, and an even more emphatic state-
ment about how important sustainability, technology, and social
justice are to a meaningful and successful architecture. Without
them, even the most elegant architectural form is—well, I do not
want to say it is without value, because it is not. But it is at risk of
seeming indulgent, if not fatuous.
In the third decade of the twenty-first century, the connec-
tion between architecture and social justice, never as strong as it
should have been, is surely more tenuous than it ought to be. It
may not be enough to state, as I did in chapter 1, that architects
can only build what society wants them to build, and that their
job is to be prepared to design the best possible housing for the
poor when society decides it is ready to address the urgent prob-
lem of our housing shortage. That is true, of course, but it also
begs the question of whether architecture, as an ethical profes-
sion, can and should do more than wait in the wings. Architects
may not have the power to realize their dreams without clients
prepared to build them, but they are also citizens, citizens with
special training that they can use to present ideas and to play a
vital role in the civic discourse. Architects can and should try to
show how better buildings can bring society closer to the ideals
of social justice.
One of the most encouraging developments since the first
edition of this book was written is the remarkable growth of
the young architecture firm called MASS Design Group, whose
name is an acronym for Model for Architecture Serving Society.
244 Afterword
MASS, which is organized as a nonprofit, came to international
note by designing a group of hospitals and schools in Africa, us-
ing local materials and local artisans to produce work of consid-
erable sophistication. Its message that innovative modern design
can and should coexist with social justice has resonated around
the world, and the firm, originally based in Boston, is now doing
work across the United States, Africa, and Asia, and its portfolio
has expanded to include such projects as the National Memo-
rial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, arguably
the finest modern memorial since Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Pulse Memorial in Or-
lando. Its work is wide-ranging in scope, and of consistently high
design quality.
MASS has shown that architects can assume power on their
own, and it is significant that this firm of talented, idealistic
Americans found its first opportunities not in the United States
but in Africa, where limited resources meant that its architects’
expertise and eagerness to work were welcomed. That it took the
success of MASS’s early work in Africa to prompt American cli-
ents to turn to the firm and give it the chance to work in its home
country says something about the cynicism of the American sys-
tem, but also about its potential for change.
In an age when we grapple anew with racism and other issues
of social justice such as increasing income inequality, what is the
ethical responsibility of architecture? It is difficult to imagine an
entire profession remaking itself along the lines of MASS Design
Group, but can architects be encouraged to take on more socially
responsible work? The establishment of Architecture Lobby, an
Afterword 245
advocacy organization focusing on the ethics of architectural
practice and its connection to social justice, is a heartening sign.
So, too, is another organization called Who Builds Your Ar-
chitecture? that was established to investigate the relationships
between cutting-edge architects and the complicated tangle of
worker exploitation, global migration, and human rights viola-
tions behind many of the celebrated buildings, often in the Mid-
dle East, designed by prominent architects.
There will always be plenty of architects available to design
homes for the rich for high fees; it would make a difference if
there were also more of them willing to design socially beneficial
projects—community centers, temporary housing, cultural fa-
cilities, public places—in underserved neighborhoods, on a pro
bono basis. In 2016 the jury that awards the Pritzker Prize, the
celebrated honor that is widely considered the highest award an
architect can achieve, saw fit to select as its laureate Alejandro
Aravena, a Chilean who has devoted much of his career to cre-
ating exactly this kind of socially responsible work. And in 2022
the Pritzker went to Diébédo Francis Kéré, the first Black archi-
tect ever to win the prize, whose work both in his native Burkina
Faso and in Germany, where he bases his practice, is exception-
ally attuned to social justice, local materials, and native architec-
tural traditions, all of which he weaves together with a sophisti-
cated modernist sensibility. In terms of symbolism, at least, there
could be nothing more encouraging than these recent Pritzkers.
There also is a growing movement among architects to refuse
outright to design prisons and centers for incarceration, which
is surely an attempt to establish some ethical standard beyond
246 Afterword
mere client service. On another front, many architects have be-
come leaders in the quest for greater sustainability, encouraging
clients toward the use of new materials and systems that conserve
energy; others make a point of building simply and using locally
sourced materials, a construction equivalent of the farm-to-table
culinary movement. And others decline commissions for which
the carbon footprint would be unacceptable.
These are laudable actions, and to say that they are more ur-
gent today than they were when the first edition of this book was
written would be an understatement. I could say the same about
efforts in urbanism that seem to take on greater importance to-
day than they did in 2009. I wrote about the street as being a
more important building block of the city than the individual
building, and of the need for buildings to be designed with an
awareness of how they fit together to make a street, and this is as
true today as it ever was. But I did not deal with the question of
who uses the street, or what uses the street, and today, as the pre-
eminence of the automobile comes more and more into question,
the shift away from cars has had a significant impact on the de-
sign of the street, and the way in which the city works. Many cit-
ies now have bike-share systems and networks of cycling lanes, a
notable step away from the hegemony of the private car. In many
cities the experience of dining during the Covid-19 pandemic led
restaurants to set up outdoor dining not just on the sidewalk but
sometimes on the street itself, taking even more space away from
automobiles. These dining sheds, which range from creative and
elegant to decrepit and awful, have all changed the look of cities,
mostly for the better.
Afterword 247
Many things look different today than they did then, which is
why the most significant change in the text of this book is in the
section of chapter 1 that deals with the University of Virginia. It
may have been naïve to have written in 2009 about Thomas Jef-
ferson’s campus purely in aesthetic terms, but it would be entirely
unthinkable today to discuss Jefferson’s sublime design without
acknowledging its intimate connection to the institution of slav-
ery, since enslaved people not only built the campus but also op-
erated it until the Civil War. If Jefferson’s design was primarily an
attempt to use classicism as a living architectural lesson, its form
was also guided by the need to accommodate to a vast population
of enslaved laborers. Thanks to important scholarship that has
appeared since 2009, it is now inconceivable to look at Jefferson’s
great creation in an aesthetic vacuum, as we once did, as a thing
separate from the social context within which it was made. It
reminds us again that the making of architecture is inseparable
from power.
But if no building can be fully divorced from its social context,
and the making of architecture is always a reflection of someone’s
power, it is also true that the appreciation of it can and must be
about more than the history of the power that built it. In other
words, there are many situations in which a problematic social
context does not and should not impact our experience of a work
of architecture in as overt a way as at the University of Virginia.
In recent years there has been increasing criticism of the archi-
tect Philip Johnson’s extended flirtation with fascism in his early
career; it is a reprehensible period in Johnson’s life, but do we
need to view his Glass House, built years after he had renounced
248 Afterword
his foolish and dangerous political efforts, through the lens of
fascism? Jefferson designed the University of Virginia as an ex-
pression of a slaveholding society, and we have no choice but to
see it within the context of his political views. Johnson designed
the Glass House and its many outbuildings not as an expression
of his former fascist tendencies but rather as an expression of his
wish to pursue aesthetic experience before all else. Elevating aes-
thetic experience above all was Johnson’s greatest ambition, but
also arguably his greatest weakness. His architecture needs to be
seen and judged in that vein, which is why, unlike the passages
about the University of Virginia, the references to Johnson’s work
in this book have not been changed for this edition. His past,
awful as it is, may color our perceptions of the Glass House, but
it should not be the predominant framework through which we
view it. Johnson’s past should be discussed openly (as it is by the
curators of the Glass House, now a public museum operated by
the National Trust for Historic Preservation), but it is only a
part of the context of the Glass House, which is shaped at least
as much by Johnson’s knowledge of architectural history, by his
complicated relationships to his mentors such as Mies van der
Rohe, and by his deep connections to the worlds of art and art
history.
Johnson’s Glass House is but one example of a social context
that is significant but needs to be seen in balance with aesthetic
experience. Another, quite different, is the new wave of super-tall,
super-thin towers that have been built in many cities, dramati-
cally remaking their skylines. Many of these buildings contain
mainly apartments for the very rich, who rarely use them. They
Afterword 249
are often financed by global investment capital, which means
that neither the builders nor the occupants of these buildings
have much connection to the neighborhoods of which they are
a part, or, indeed, much interest in the welfare of the city that
spreads out beneath them. In New York, an entire group of these
towers overlooking Central Park has become known as “Billion-
aire’s Row,” and it has changed the vista from within the park
and changed the nature of the neighborhood just south of the
park.
All these towers are troubling in terms of the social context
that they represent, manifestations of an income inequality that
has always been present in the city, but rarely demonstrated as
forcefully, and as conspicuously, as here. Still, as works of archi-
tecture, some of these towers are much better than others. The
architect Robert A. M. Stern has produced three that are hand-
some and dignified, evoking traditional New York apartment
houses from the era between the two world wars, reconceived at
the new scale of the twenty-first century. They are undoubtedly
easier on the eye than many of their garish neighbors. Jean Nou-
vel has designed a tower nearby, beside the Museum of Modern
Art, that is far more exciting than the Stern buildings and con-
tributes genuine life and drama to the skyline, evoking the spirit
of Manhattan’s classic skyscrapers in a less literal way than Stern’s
towers do. The same could be said of the thinnest tower of all,
designed by the architectural firm SHoP, and of another one by
Rafael Viñoly, whose facade is a simple grid of identical squares,
rising more than 1,300 feet into the sky. In one way or another
every one of these buildings is better than the myriad of gaudy
250 Afterword
glass towers around them, their peers in terms of social context
if not design. Should we write off all these buildings together,
since they are all part of the same dispiriting social context, so to
speak? Or should we make a distinction between the ones that
offer some aesthetic pleasure as a tradeoff?
I opt for the latter, not to forgive a lack of social responsibility,
or to suggest that it is possible to be co-opted by architectural
ambition (or to be bedazzled by architectural theatrics), but to
acknowledge that there is a difference between buildings that
provide visual pleasure, even if they are contributing relatively
little to society other than as investment vehicles, and buildings
that do not. The way a building looks is also a kind of contribu-
tion to society at large—that is the point. Design that makes
us feel pleasure, design that makes life better in some way, is a
way that the architecture of any building makes a gesture to the
public. How a building looks matters. It is not everything, not
by any means, but it always has some effect, either subliminal or
direct, on everyone who sees it, whether or not they will ever have
reason to enter it. Some designs speak to the public and offer a
facade that encourages us to look more carefully, to ponder what
we see, and to feel enriched by seeing it. Other buildings merely
scream at us, and some turn away altogether.
As I said in chapter 1, architecture’s legacy is not power alone,
though it behooves us to pay attention to its relation to power.
Architecture’s legacy is ultimately form and space, and the im-
pact that these things have on us—the way architecture confers
a sense of place, and the way it impacts on our memory. Archi-
tecture exists in the real world. It is an experience of physical
Afterword 251
reality, not of virtual reality, which can be technically dazzling,
but which exists as a simulacrum of experience. Virtual reality is
a tool that can sometimes help us understand architecture, but
it is not the same as architecture. Why Architecture Matters was
written to investigate the material reality of the built world, and
the many different kinds of effects, both good and bad, that it
can have on us.
It comes down, in the end, to joy, to delight, to the nurtur-
ing experience of good architecture and to the exhilarating, even
sublime, experience of great architecture. We need both types of
architecture—the good and the great—and we need to be able
to recognize that while there is a difference between them, there
is no clear dividing line between the good architecture that cares
for us and the sublime architecture that thrills and moves us.
We need good architecture to nurture us quietly; we need great
architecture to uplift us at special moments. Proportion, scale,
texture, light, materials, how all of these are put together, how
they interact with one another, what kind of composition they
make on the outside and what kind of space they make on the
inside—these are the things that make us respond to any work
of architecture, whether it is a prominent building intended to
occupy the foreground, or a quiet building intended to contrib-
ute something to a civilized background. All these things have
always made architecture matter, and they still do.
252 Afterword

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why architecture matters

First edition 2009.

The City Observed, New York: An Architectural Guide to

And to the memory of Vincent Scully, Ada

one Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 1

two Challenge and Comfort 45

three Architecture as Object 69

four Architecture as Space 114

five Architecture and Memory 143

six Buildings and Time 175

seven Buildings and the Making of Place 218

Afterword: Architecture, Power, and

Illustration Credits 275

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

There are surely some readers for whom architecture matters in a

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

2 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 3

4 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 5

6 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 7

8 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 9

steel columns in front of them combine to have immense sensual

10 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

and finished a decade later, in 1939, had an even more mundane

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 11

We certainly could not live with constant attention to music and

12 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 13

14 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 15

16 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

18 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Monuments as powerful, as subtle, and as successful at appealing

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 19

20 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 21

22 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

When Vitruvius, writing in ancient Rome, dictated that archi­

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 23

24 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 25

26 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 27

28 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 29

30 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 31

32 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 33

34 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 35

36 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

Meaning, Culture, and Symbol 37

Let me conclude this chapter with a discussion of another place

38 Meaning, Culture, and Symbol

ings, many of them undistinguished, that were erected to give

When Vitruvius, writing in ancient Rome, dictated that archi