In the book 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.

In the book 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.