Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

superstitions, our worries and our wars; they will gawk at our cruelty. They will study our art and argue over our history. They will understand truths about us of which none of us are yet aware. And they, too, will be wrong. Just less wrong than we were.

The influence of literary theory on its related disciplines has prompted much debate about the notion of ‘authorship’. Yet the attraction of exploring architecture, or more specifically a building, through the life of its architect (author) remains a significant force in the construction of its histories. This is particularly the case when the architect has been identified as a major figure in the evolution of the architectural history. Conversely, buildings without architects are pushed to the sidelines of history.

In architectural history then the focus on the biography either of an architect or sometimes a patron separates ‘architecture’ from the function of the building, the theory of the processes of architecture and the broader social and cultural significance. To this end architecture is presented in a kind of historical cul-de-sac divorced from any contemporary or theoretical meaning it may have.

[A]rchitecture is more than a stage for the acting out of these performances. It offers a space for other social groups and kinds of social interactions. It is also important to remember that in examples such as the country house it was home to a large number of residents representing a variety of interests.

Architecture begins where engineering ends.

I am interested in how we interrogate architecture in terms of its social functions and meanings. Architectural historians writing on eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain have tended to see social history as the answer to this question. But the social history of architecture or the histories of specific social groups which operated in and around the architecture or building(s), or indeed the spaces created by them or for them, provide only a backdrop or loose historical context.

Histories based on biographies can present a one-dimensional image of the architects involved, often inflating what was a portion of their existence, interests or social and cultural significance, making architecture appear to be their driving force when in reality it may have been merely one of several interests.

There’s something about the training of an architect that’s particularly suited to our time: it’s about bringing disparate pieces of information together in a framework. Architecture is about more than building buildings.

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

Architectural History is more than just the study of buildings. Architecture of the past and the present remains an essential emblem of a distinctive social system and set of cultural values, and as a result it has been the subject of study of a variety of disciplines.

Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the color of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch.

Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect (expensive, prone to destruction, and morally unreliable), protest against the state of things. More awkwardly still, architecture asks us to imagine that happiness might often have an unostentatious, unheroic character to it, that it might be found in a run of old floorboards or in a wash of morning light over a plaster wall — in undramatic, frangible scenes of beauty that move us because we are aware of the darker backdrop against which they are set.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.