Why We Build

Description

Buildings are driven by human emotions and desires: hope, power, money, sex, and the idea of home.

In Why We Build Rowan Moore explores the making of buildings from conception to inhabitation, and reveals the paradoxical power of architecture: it looks fixed and solid, but is always changing in response to the lives around it.

Moving across the globe and through history, through works of folly, beauty, spectacle, and subtlety the doomed mansion of an Atlanta multimillionaire, the phenomenally successful High Line in New York Moore gives a provocative and iconoclastic view of what makes architecture, why it matters, and why we find it fascinating.

You will never look at a building in the same way again.

Author Information

Rowan Moore is the architecture critic for the Observer and previously for the Evening Standard. He is also a trained architect, and between 2002 and 2008 was the Director of the Architecture Foundation.