Importance of Architecture

If you ever wondered why architecture is important—look up and around. You are likely

surrounded by it right now. Architecture’s grasp—that is, buildings and the designed

environment—ends only in extreme conditions (the bottom of the ocean, the

atmosphere, and a few dwindling spots on terrestrial earth.)

Unique among creative and artistic professions, architecture must always reflect the age

and cultural context that produced it. Designing and building architecture takes time,

money, and collaboration (from financiers, civic officials, builders, architects, and more).

It doesn’t happen in a vacuum and can never truly have just one author. Architects work

with dozens if not hundreds or thousands to shape their buildings, and along this chain,

a deeper and richer set of values are transmitted; ones that define exactly how cultures

see themselves and their world, and also how people see and experience each other.

Beyond merely providing shelter, architecture becomes the stage set and context for

our lives. It’s the reason we feel empowered on the roof deck of an 80-story building,

connected and thriving in a busy public plaza, and humbled in a soaring cathedral.

Communities form within and at the behest of architecture, and take on their buildings’

characteristics. Architecture connects to economics and the sciences, and the people

that practice it can both be detail-oriented technicians (solving equations that push

buildings higher into the sky, or conserving every possible electron of electricity pumped

into its walls), and poets of space and form.

An architect once told me: When you learn about ancient cultures, the first thing people

point to is their architecture, because it’s so expressive of who they were. The example
they used was ancient Egypt. Take a look at the pyramids and the Sphinx, and you’ll get

a good idea of how they regarded their rulers, their religion, and the qualities of the land

that they drew their building materials from. The towering feats of delicate, narrative

stone masonry that made up Gothic architecture, emerging in Europe in the Middle

Ages, was a perfect counterpoint to its age of reverence verging on fear of divinity,

during a period of grim instability. The Industrial Revolution, which re-organized the

world along rational standards of machine production, inevitably birthed Modernism,

which used mass-produced steel and glass to replicate this emerging order in cities. All

revolutions, especially political ones, turn to architecture immediately to create their

most prominent monuments. And this ability of architecture to explain its age happens

whether a building is an elaborate showpiece or a banal standby.