An inscrutable datum of experience; a thing that is undeniably the case, but which is impervious to reasoned explication Architecture has graver ends; capable of sublimity, it touches the most brutal instincts through its objectivity; it appeals to the highest of the faculties, through its very abstraction. Architectural abstraction has the distinctive and magnificent quality that, while being rooted in brute fact, it spiritualizes this, because brute fact is nothing other than the materialization, the symbol of a possible idea. Brute fact is amenable to ideas only through an order that is projected onto it. The emotions aroused by architecture emanate from physical conditions that are ineluctable, irrefutable, forgotten today.
