The Globe and Mail

To stand on Bloor Street at the top of Philosopher's Walk is to be in the middle of a heated argument between two of Toronto's new iconic architectural projects. To the east is Daniel Libeskind's Royal Ontario Museum; to the west is KPMB's Royal Conservatory of Music. Both were commissioned as part of the wonderful wave of new construction intended to advance the city's cultural and tourism status. Both are transformative additions to original structures of some distinction; both house venerable institutions in need of change.

But there the similarity ends. If the new front to the ROM is uncompromising, clashing, willful, then the approach to the Conservatory is by contrast restrained, harmonious, respectful. The one displays the new: steel, concrete, titanium. The other employs wood, stone and glass. And the argument? Which building works best, which building is more of its time, which better reflects the city and which the wider world? Which is art, which is beautiful? Which do you like?

In Why Architecture Matters, Paul Goldberger has written the book to help us better understand these questions. Architectural columnist for The New Yorker, Goldberger is the dean of U.S. critics, with a style accessible and academic, engaged and reflective. Intended for a general audience and helped by Goldberger's fluid, conversational prose, this is a nonetheless serious book. Architecture matters to him vitally; it has been his life. The book is an attempt to draw some conclusions about that relationship, to prove the point of his title.

What makes great architecture? When does a building become architecture, become art? What kind of an art is it that you not only look at but also live in? Goldberger starts with these questions, as old as architecture itself, with a succinct history of architectural criticism. Vitruvius, writing in ancient Rome around 30 BC, set the agenda for all subsequent debate when he identified the three essential but often conflicting elements of great architecture; what he called “commodity, firmness and delight.” They're what we might today call function, to meet the needs for which the building is being built; structure, to stay upright and keep out the rain; and beauty, to make an aesthetic contribution.

Architecture is an affair of the eye, and Goldberger is helping us look

For Goldberger, architecture becomes art when it finds resolution in those imperatives by creating passion in their tension. He cautions us against resting judgments outside that frame. A building is not art simply because it is virtuous, because it is sustainably green or in some way socially equitable. Not that he isn't fully supportive of such initiatives, but they are not in themselves sufficient for good architecture.

Good advice. If moral intent alone could build a city, Toronto would be the biggest, most beautiful metropolis in the world. It takes something more; great architecture will raise a thrill, a shock, a sense of contentment, delight. How does it do that?

The book comes most alive for those trying to make sense of what they see and feel in architecture when he takes us out on the street to look at buildings. Architecture is an affair of the eye, and Goldberger is helping us look. He contrasts three well-known U.S. office towers; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building and Edward Durell Stone's General Motors Building in New York, and I.M. Pei's John Hancock Tower in Boston. He takes us on a detailed inspection of their shapes, structures, materials and context, helping to explain why we react as we do.