Questions about the beginning, the primal past, and visionary propositions about the future are seductive and occasionally stimulating, but ultimately limiting. And, no matter how tempting and politically correct, defining architecture primarily as theater or ritual, be it social, political or religious ritual, is too rigidly normative. Nor is architecture just a utilitarian, information-mediating device akin to the typewriter or the fax machine, as some have suggested recently. Such a view would only follow the many failed attempts at redefining materialism in a less reductive light. To them I say, Good luck.
Architecture is, of course, each of the foregoing, but also more.
Architecture is a pretext for critical considerations, where, starting from an architectonic detail, one quickly succeeds in establishing a law of expression manifested in a concrete abstraction . This, in turn, becomes an intersubjective territory from which will spring the powers of imagination and inspiration. Today, the most critical questions are epistemological. Architecture as a mode of knowing - is an act of measurement . Architecture helps us construct a new scaffolding for a family of relationships bridging from one culture to another, and from one age to the next.