ABSTRACT
Architecture is not created in a vacuum. It is fundamentally part of our make-up, or, as the Renaissance scholar and architect L.B. Alberti put it, 'firmly rooted in the Mind of Man'.
Therefore, while every building task is about ordering the environment for our benefit, it does so in answer to both our physical and emotional needs, and our cultural aspirations. The extent to which either of these factors influences particular design decisions depends on the situation, but one would be hardpressed to find built form of any significance anywhere without a cultural dimension to it. The nineteenthcentury American sculptor and theorist, Horatio Greenough (1805-52) - who is credited with first enunciating the principles upon which the influential functionalist doctrine was founded - observed that all great developments in the history of architecture had one thing in common: they were the 'fruits of a dominating creed'. He regarded religion as the only human construct pervasive enough to unite the 'motives and means for grand and consistent systems of structure' (Greenough 1962: 115).
