Why We Build by Rowan Moore: review You wouldn't automatically expect to read the phrase, "gooey blossoms the colour of vulvas" in a book on architecture. But Why We Build by Rowan Moore has plenty more verbal surprises from surreal to sarcastic, and once, in a long, unpunctuated list of things, poetically experimental. Moore, a trained architect, former director of the Architecture Foundation (AF) and now architecture writer for the Observer, has a lot to offer those who like verbal flexibility and thought-provoking aphorisms. There is also a sense of mischief; of which calling architectural critics parasites, "pallid and goggling," is a prime example. But if famous architects were a coconut shy, Moore would go home with the giant teddy. Few architectural writers would dare say of Frank Lloyd Wright's work: "It is easy to be oppressed by the diminutive genius that emits from every surface." Or to call Ruskin "borderline bonkers." Even of many male architects" hero, Le Corbusier, he says of that man's own bed: "A place of repose, or Eros, or tenderness, it is not." So what does Why We Build offer? A philosophical look at the relation between people and buildings, from the often power-crazed instigators to those who come later, and live in them. Despite many interesting modulations on this theme, Moore's distillate is this: that buildings are "the mineral interval between the thoughts and actions that make them and the thoughts and actions that inhabit them." One could say there are two books here. What might have stood as a biography of brilliant Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi is spliced into the final book's much wider range, an exploration of the impetuses behind modern architecture. It is also, at one point, a very personal one, when the author relives his attempt, as AF director, to realise the first Zaha Hadid building in London. Moore takes us from the Palm in Dubai to the Dome in London via many buildings, periodically returning to descriptions of Bo Bardi's poetic and humanist output as the rational and lyric counterpoint to the frequent lunatic or autocratic erections described elsewhere. Moore really hits stride with the Dome: "The Dome proved the power of schmoozing and of the deity Delivery"; whose contents, once completed, he describes as "crowd-pleasing gunk" (although surely no one would want to be part of that particular crowd) and about whose political genesis, perhaps because he was in that milieu at that time of aggressive races to build skyscrapers, he is rapier sharp. "Architecture," he says, '"was the lubricant for the penetration of the skyline." Elegant and witty, with a sometimes 18th-century sensuality, this is a hard-hitting book with great panache. Why We Build Rowan Moore Picador, £20, 422pp