Why We Build

Buildings are driven by human emotions and desires: hope, power, money, sex, and the idea of home.

In Why We Build Rowan Moore explores the making of buildings from conception to inhabitation, and reveals the paradoxical power of architecture: it looks fixed and solid, but is always changing in response to the lives around it.

Moving across the globe and through history, through works of folly, beauty, spectacle, and subtlety - the doomed mansion of an Atlanta multimillionaire, the phenomenally successful High Line in New York - Moore gives a provocative and iconoclastic view of what makes architecture, why it matters, and why we find it fascinating.

You will never look at a building in the same way again.