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of British Architects’ Stirling Prize for 2000 and 2001 (and the practice may well continue) when the prize-winning building was chosen by a panel of experts. The awards were shown on television – a quintessentially populist medium – and the television company organized a poll of its viewers to select their favourite building from those shortlisted. What happened was that the popular verdict was announced, shortly followed by the declaration of the ‘real’ award, decided by expert opinion (which went to an altogether different building). We do not live in a unified culture, and we do not have a single way of determining what we, society as a whole, think is good. It is unusual to compare the results of two competing methods of evaluation in a public forum, as one of them tends to undermine the apparent validity of the other. In matters of taste we are less likely than we were a generation ago to bow to expert opinion, which is certainly a good thing by democratic standards, but it is not necessarily good for the art because it can involve a coarsening of judgement, and can be the means of sanctioning philistinism. I know that I would not want to say that the most popular thing was always the best one, but in our society the popular also has power, because it tends to have market forces on its side, and from time to time the rare and extraordinary does find popular acclaim. Then the object in question, whether it is Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water (Figure 10) is not only a delight in itself, it also confers status on its owner, and therefore if it comes on to the market, its price is high compared with the cost of making it.

10. Falling Water, Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1936–9); architect: Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959). It must have taken a great leap of faith to be persuaded that this house could be viable – hovering with breathtaking audacity over a waterfall in the depths of a forest – but even the wealthy businessman who commissioned it as a holiday retreat baulked at Wright’s idea of covering the faces of the overhanging balconies in gold leaf. The living rooms feel close to the natural landscape, partly because the sound of the waterfall is inescapable, and partly because rocky outcrops erupt in the main living room. When approached by way of the front door, the house seems to grow out of the landscape, but it is the view from below that is best known. Wright took the reinforced concrete beyond its limits, and the building has sagged and needed substantial restoration work to keep it looking good. It remains a dazzling exploration of the possibilities of what a house can be.

The precise ways in which we respond to buildings are variable according to our prior experiences of buildings. Depending on our acculturation, we might be impressed or dismayed by different things, but cutting across all considerations of style and taste, we respond also to the kind of life that we suppose to be implied in a building – whether it feels wholesome or dispiriting, sordid or dangerous, whether it opens up new possibilities, or reminds us of places where we have been happy in the past. We respond to these aspects of buildings, which are not intrinsic in the buildings themselves, as well as to the abstract set of shapes that we see.

Chapter 2

Growth of the Western tradition

Some places are special

In the ancient Greek world, one of the most sacred places was the sanctuary at Delphi, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. This was where the god Apollo and the nine Muses who inspired artists were supposed to live. It also had other older associations, and had been used as a place of worship from very ancient times, when snakes were considered to be divine. There was not a city here, but buildings accumulated, many of them gifts from the various city-states that made up the Greek federation. People came here from all over the Greek-speaking world in order to consult the oracle: an arcane procedure that involved a priestess inhaling the intoxicating fumes from burning laurel leaves, and uttering