On Beauty, Power and the Architecture of Modern Ambition

There is a genre of contemporary commercial architecture I think of as the Architecture of Performed Virtue. The soaring atrium, exposed timber, bicycle storage visible from the street, rooftop garden with beehives. The message: we are different. We care.

The irony is that many companies inhabiting these buildings are precisely like the companies of the past — in their labour practices, tax arrangements, relationship to communities.

The buildings that deserve to be called beautiful are those whose architecture reflects genuine alignment between what an institution says it is and what it actually is.