Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture

Architecture is about activated emotion and desire, argues Observer architecture critic Moore in this wide-ranging, informative, and impassioned narrative of why architecture is fascinating, unstable, and a necessary poetry of the everyday. The book’s aim, he argues, is not to “instruct” but to reveal the actual intent behind building so as to correct what Moore defines as the central failure of development and architecture: disguising emotional choices as practical ones. Structuring his narrative thematically, Moore begins his lively account with the subject of desire, taking contemporary architectural forms in Dubai as his central example, a city whose mythology, he suggests, was created before the city itself came into existence, where buildings’ functionalities are subservient to illusion and speculation. Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House also exemplifies the dreamlike and poetic qualities that Dubai developers insist their buildings embody. Moore’s other themes are equally grand: architecture as persuasion, propaganda, and power; building as a sometimes deceptive and hopeful vision of the future; the relationship between building, financial value, and social values; architecture, death, and the eternal. Moore’s deftly chosen and analyzed examples range from Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano and Jamaa el Fna “square” in Marrakesh to Manhattan’s High Line. This is a highly engaging if at times overbroad vision of architecture’s emotive and pragmatic powers. B&w photos throughout. (Sept.)