Omar Fetouh’s Reviews > What is Architecture?: An Essay on Landscapes, Buildings, and Machines > Status Update

First of all, the land. Second of all, the other people. Now for the third: third of all is ourselves. The emptiness inside us that religion - or creativity - fills up. The abyss inside we face down daily and fill with prayer, or fill with work. The question at the back of all other questions that we answer with faith, or with courage. What will happen to us? The tears that spring up and flood us with feeling.

Music, drama, architecture, the great arts. Great because they require many people, and great because they correspond to the three states of human existence: facing oneself, facing the other people, and facing the unimpeachable natural word.

Stones with character, that’s one hypothesis for what architecture is, although it’s as primitive as a cave painting to put it so simply.

It seems to me sometimes that we’re all sitting in a huge valley with people shouting contradictory things at each other. It’s an ancient valley, which was once full of the monuments of civilization; reassuring but constricting.