I was delighted when I found the contemporary French philosopher Alain de Botton and his book “The Architecture of Happiness,” about the philosophical and psychological relationship between architecture and our identities.

De Botton writes: “The buildings we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol the values we think... See more

Look for the architecture beneath, listen for it in a piece of music, sense it in a piece of poetry, feel it a dance, see it in a painting, contemplate it in the cosmological, observe it in your own perceptual faculties.

The home of the Utopian impulse was architecture rather than painting or sculpture. Painting can make us happy, but building is the art we live in; it is the social art par excellence, the carapace of political fantasy, the exoskeleton of one’s economic dreams. It is also the one art nobody can escape.