It seems to me that architecture is very much something that causes us both pleasure and trouble. I live in the part of Western London where I think many of the streets are, where I live, are really, really ugly. And this distresses me every time I walk to a supermarket or walk to a tube. I think, why did they build that, terribly without architecture? It lasts so long, and if you write a bad book or do a bad play, you know, I will be shocked when it is showed and no one would suffer. A bad building has a serious impact for, could be hundreds of years on the people around it. And suppose the book arose a little bit from frustration, almost anger, and there is so much bad architecture around. And then I realized if you talk about architecture, you will say, Why buildings are not more beautiful And you will say, I can use such a word as beauty. That's a really arrogant word and no one knows what beautiful is. It's all in the eye of the beholder. I couldn't help but think that actually. Well, you know that we all attempt to agree that Rome is nice, nicer than Bilkey King. San Francisco has the edge of Frankfurt. So we can make that sort of generalization. Surely there are some things we can say about why a building works or why it doesn't. So the books really attempt to suggest why architecture works when it does and what might be going to be wrong when it doesn't work.