The opening of Introduction
"We may live without architecture, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes and the uncorrupted marble bears. There are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture, and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality; it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled and their strength wrought and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life."[1]
So wrote John Ruskin in one of his flashes of genius, and never was word truer. Architecture is the living voice of the past. Architecture is history. By architecture the forefathers from whom we come relate to us their progress in knowledge, their prowess in handicrafts, their economic conditions, their sorrows, their rejoicings, their aspirations. They wrote it down, those men and women whose blood is our blood, on great stone pages of perennial beauty for us to read--if only we would.