Rowan Moore

Wherever you are on property's wheel of chance, you are likely to be powerfully affected by it. Perhaps you have changed your life in search of a place you can afford. Or maybe you are a homeowner who worries about a crash in prices. Or perhaps you have found you are shut out of the magic kingdom of ownership and forced into paying high rents to indifferent landlords. This is a powerful examination of how property came to shape the modern world - and why it now threatens the freedom and stability it was meant to sustain.

Architecture, good and bad, is shaped by emotions. In Why We Build Rowan Moore shows how buildings are driven by human emotions and desires -- such as hope, power, money, sex, and the idea of home -- and how buildings then shape our experiences. He 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. Moore takes us on a personal journey, moving freely across the globe and through history, through works of folly, beauty, spectacle, and subtlety. He uncovers the doomed mansion of an Atlanta multimillionaire, the phenomenally successful High Line in New York, and the remarkable Museu de Arte in Sao Paulo. He discusses baroque churches and Egyptian pyramids alongside works of the moment. We meet extraordinary characters: Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai, the lecherous Stanford White, and Lina Bo Bardi, the most underrated architect of the twentieth century. Refusing to bow to fashion or reputation, Moore gives a provocative and iconoclastic view of what makes architecture, why it matters, and why we find it fascinating. After reading Why We Build you will never look at a building in the same way again.