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The shaping of our buildings is a curios activity. On the one hand, builders through history have been driven to produce novelty and invention in their designs. On the other, they have suppressed this drive, constraining their inventiveness not for reasons of utility or efficiency, but to satisfy arbitrary norms of style. In this book Sonit Bafna develops an explanation for these countervailing tendencies.

Bafna argues that just as buildings serve a fundamental social function, they must also serve a second basic and universal function - an imaginative epistemic one. The function is served by catering to a basic human curiosity for acquiring increasingly objective forms of new perceptual knowledge. The necessity of satisfying this function accounts for the rhetorical character of architectural works, and provides insights into several questions related to the historical explanation of architectural works: why some architects find it useful to create conceptual schemas for their designs; why architectural styles emerge; how to construct historical explanations of architectural oeuvres; whether buildings can express specific ideas; and, finally, why aesthetics matters to architecture. The book ends on a provocative note with a naturalizing but somewhat deflationary explanation of aesthetics in general.

The book is intended to be a contribution to architectural morphology, extending its traditional interests in spatial form of buildings to the design of their appearance. In addition to the specialists working in this area, this book will speak to historians of architecture interested in inferential criticism, as well as architects seeking explanations of why they do what they do. Beyond architecture, it will interest philosophers of aesthetics and psychologists who are curious about the nature of architecture as an aesthetic activity.