- Purpose of this book: to reconstruct the story of how environments are created that

shape experience and communicate identity through the ways in which spaces are
formed and surfaces are decorated
- Basic premise: many builders and architects, as well as their clients, have used either
the history of local architecture or an awareness of past and present architecture
elsewhere, and often both, to create novel structures that shaped the ways in which they
and their societies were perceived.

- 1400 because: the clearly antiquarian character of architecture in many different parts of
the world and the extent of contact and interaction between geographically disparate
cultures quickened at about that time
- scale of the distances across which architectural ideas travelled with increasing speed

- “Timurid architecture can stand for Islamic architecture as a whole not because Muslims
from Morocco to Bangladesh shared a single approach to architecture—monumental
tombs, for instance, remained almost unknown out- side central and South Asia—but
because Timur compelled skilled artisans from the vast range of territory he either raided
or controlled to come to Samarqand, where their combined talents produced new
syntheses of previously diverse local forms and motifs. Bo Bardi, who emigrated from
Italy to Brazil after World War II, was well aware of contemporary architecture in Europe
and North America, as well as enthusiastic about her new home.”

- Importance of recognizing the large number of people who share responsibility for the
creation and maintenance of buildings
- A wider range of clients and construction workers, not to mention generations of
users, should properly share credit for building and maintaining the structures
that surround us
- Glass house - modern because involvement of woman, Timur’s daughter in law’s
activities in the building as an an important architectural patron

- Architecture gives substance to the ambitions of those individuals and groups with
enough wealth and clout to build.
- Rather than merely reflecting culture, architecture contributes to crafting it
- Timur’s tomb speaks of his political power and personal taste; the visitor
transfixed by the elegance of its decoration momentarily loses consciousness of
the brutality of many of his military campaigns
- Glass House Bo Bardi presented her husband with the perfect stage set from
which to rehabilitate himself as a major figure in the postwar art world
- Persuasive, rhetorical power of buildings, which can fade or change over time
- “More than simply sheltering the living and the dead from sun and rain, wind and cold,
the Gur-i-Mir and the Glass House are examples of the ways in which buildings, humble
as well as monumental, convey the force of personality, the wonder of technology, and
the daunting power of imagination.”