Why Are Some Buildings More Interesting Than Others?

... Any claims we make for buildings that fascinate us and that we find worthy of reflection prove hard to substantiate when our audience has little or no knowledge of the subject or does not incline to our point of view<a name="more"></a><br>
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Architecture of every kind answers to purposes, but we also make distinctions between the kind and the quality of purposes. Utility is only one among our expectations, and rarely the main, and indeed never the only purpose. Where architecture merely aligns itself with its own conditions—exhibiting little more than economy, efficiency, and ambition—it fails to mediate between its own material existence and our need to locate ourselves in the world. Only acts of imaginative transmission allow us to figure out how we came to fall into the place we occupy and what prospects lie before us. The value we attribute to any building also implies a recognition of imaginative acts. Imaginative buildings speak about the realm of nature as a domain of civilization, not as something infinitely removed or heedlessly replaced, and they engage our senses by means of ingenious inscriptions of many-layered meanings no one can grasp, much less exhaust, at a glance.