Why Architecture Matters
Architecture matters because the discipline of designing buildings and the spaces people live, work and gather in is the most permanent thing a person meets in a day, and it shapes the quality of the hours spent inside it. A person spends 16 or 17 of every 24 hours in buildings, and the light, the air, the sound and the layout of those buildings do work on attention, health and mood that is easy to feel and hard to measure. This is why architecture is a public discipline as much as a private one: the buildings that are built are built for everyone who passes through them, and they stay built for generations.
This page sets out the reasons architecture matters, from the daily experience of the spaces it makes to the larger effect the discipline has on cities and on the environment.
Why architecture matters to the people inside it
Architecture matters to its users in the hours they spend inside it, and the effect is measurable. Studies of office buildings have found that workers in spaces with more daylight report higher concentration and fewer headaches, and schools built with good acoustic control give their students a measurable advantage in reading. The reasons cluster in 4 areas. First, shelter and safety: a building protects its occupants from weather and from harm. Second, the quality of time: a well arranged space makes the work inside it easier and the rest inside it deeper. Third, health: the air, the light and the materials of a building affect the bodies that occupy it over years. Fourth, meaning: the places where people gather, from a house to a courthouse, carry a sense of order and care that is part of the discipline's purpose. Remove any one of the 4 and the building still stands, but it has stopped doing the full work that architecture is for.
How architecture design serves daily life
Architecture design serves daily life by making the ordinary acts of a day easier to do. The design of a house is, at its core, a plan for where the people inside it will cook, sleep, wash and gather, and a good design puts those acts close to one another and out of the weather. The design of a school puts the classroom where the light falls, the library where the noise stops, and the play area where the ground is soft. The design of a hospital puts the ward where the view opens, the operating theatre where the air is clean, and the entrance where the family waits. Each of these is a decision made before the building is occupied, and it is the decision that the user feels every day without ever naming it. Good architecture design is mostly invisible, and that is how you know it is working.
The larger effect on cities and on the environment
Architecture matters beyond the individual building, and its larger effect reaches the cities and the environment it is built into. The buildings of a city are the city, and the pattern of the streets, the height of the blocks and the mix of uses in each one decide how a place works, and those patterns are set by architectural and planning decisions. A dense mixed-use block holds 3 to 5 times more walking activity than a car-first street of the same length, and that walking is the economic life of the place. The effect on the environment is the same order of magnitude. Buildings account for roughly 40 percent of global energy use and a similar share of carbon emissions, so the design of the building envelope, the orientation of the windows and the choice of materials decides how much energy a city burns for the life of its buildings, which is decades. This is why the discipline now treats the environmental performance of a building as a core design requirement, not an afterthought added at the end.
How the discipline is judged and how it is regulated
Architecture is judged on 2 scales at once, the building itself and the practice that produced it. A building is judged by whether it does its work, whether it is sound, safe and worth the cost, and whether it gives its users something they can feel. The practice is judged by the body of work it has delivered and by the license that allows it to sign. The discipline is regulated because the public interest is at stake: a building that fails to stand harms the people inside it and the people beside it, so the state requires a license before the title of architect may be used and the drawings may be signed. In the United States the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards sets the standard, and the American Institute of Architects is the professional body that represents the practice. Regulation is what turns the discipline from a craft into a public profession, and it is one of the reasons the work of architecture carries the weight it does.
Why the practice endures
The practice of architecture endures because the need it serves does not go away. As long as people build, they need the discipline that decides what to build and how, and the discipline has outlasted every material and every style it has used. The stone wall, the timber frame and the steel curtain wall are 3 answers to the same question, and the discipline is the one that asks the question well. It matters because it is the bridge between a person's need for a place and the building that becomes that place, and it is the most permanent form of human making, the one that outlasts the hand that raised it. That permanence is the reason the work of a good architect is still stood in, and still talked about, a century after the building was finished.