ABSTRACT
Architecture is generally something people takefor granted, moving toward it, around it, through it, using it without a thought. It is simply there, an unassuming backdrop, a mute, utilitarian container. Architecture is much more, however; it is the crystallization of ideas. It has been defined many ways-as shelter in the form of art, a blossoming in stone and a flowering of geometry (Ralph Waldo Emerson), frozen music (Goethe), human triumph over gravitation and the will to power (Nietzs che), the will of an epoch translated into space (architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), the magnificent play of forms in light (architect Le Corbusier), a cultural instrument (architect Louis I. Kahn), and even inhabited sculpture (sculptor Constantin Brancusi). More recently, architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable framed a rather clinical definition, calling architecture a “balance of structural science and aesthetic expression for the satisfaction of needs that go far beyond the utilitarian.”1
