Given buildings stubborn insistence on remaining silent, and setting aside for a moment art’s opaque messages, we are left with only books and speech as available means for the interrogation of reality (in some sense, speech is only books not-yet-written).

Sometimes books are easy to understand, and sometimes we gain access to their contents only with great effort. Books always propose a world considered from a displaced point of view. Book-in-hand, we don the borrowed gaze of the Other and try to operate it with inexperienced eye, misunderstanding and distorting it in an act that challenges our preconceptions. Picking up a book is always an act of self-criticism.

Whether there is already a truth secretly animating the real, or we build a truth into reality with our own minds, we might never know. In the gap between these two extremes, art weaves a sometimes unlikely spiderweb where the insect of the real can be caught. Were we to be this artist-spider, we could then suck reality's blood while we leisurely examine its carcass at length. Once that meal is finished, the construction of a new spiderweb becomes necessary.

While architecture might depend on the same cycle of appropriating the world by knowing it to death, we suspect it relies less on an individual artist’s subjectivity and more on a collective form of consciousness of which Maurice Halbwachs once dreamt. We can imagine famed architects moving about inside Maurice's dream, anonymous, their names have been forgotten, but they were once known as "the master of Bourges" or "the master of Notre Dame”.