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. 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.
