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 worthwhil... See more

Philosophers and practitioners of architecture have long studied the relationship between physical spaces and ritual, ritual and the creation of culture, culture and the embodiment of thought.

It’s why, as a complete novice to the field, one of the first things you learn is that architecture is an irreducible mode of thinking in its own right . It’s... See more

In The Image of the City (1960), Lynch identified the crucial role of the sense of place that ‘in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there and encourages the deposit of a memory trace’. This separation of ‘place’ in spirit and idea could, he argued, be differentiated physically and conceptually, as in edge, path, node, district and la... See more