Why We Build

(Paperback)

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Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

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.

Reviews

A refreshingly humane and lucid book from one of our most intelligent architecture critics Daily Telegraph
Vivid and witty . . . its a book about what happens when other non-architectural matter capital, sex, family life, the caprices of function barges into a discipline that sometimes likes to think of itself as pure Guardian

Architecture critic for the Observer, Rowan Moore, has written a fantastic book which is well worth reading for anyone interested in architecture.

Sir Paul Smith

Moore has a lot to offer those who like verbal flexibility and thought-provoking aphorisms. There is also a sense of mischief . . . if famous architects were a coconut shy, Moore would go home with the giant teddy . . . Elegant and witty, with a sometimes 18th-century sensuality, this is a hard-hitting book with great panache.

Sunday Telegraph

'Moore has conjured a rare feat in producing a work that will be appreciated by professionals and punters alike.' Observer
Moore writes with economy, clarity and wit Will Wiles, Building Design

A paean to the way we inhabit, which explains why good architecture changes constantly

Financial Times

Intelligent and cultured . . . packed with passionately held ideas about the epiphanies, farces and humanity in architecture Independent

Thoughtful and elegantly written, Why We Build will appeal to anyone with an interest in architecture . . . It benefits from a clear style and years of architectural criticism . . . the argument is forceful, but not prescriptive, the satisfying result of prolonged and sensitive observation of both buildings and human nature.

Spectator

Lively and engaging . . . Anyone with an interest in architecture will find good things here Evening Standard
A subtle, often eccentric but always entertaining guide . . . A fascinating work of love, intellectual curiosity and endurance Literary Review
Dazzling . . . theres plenty to discover. Sunday Times

Author Bio

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.