We develop our architecture through metaphor. In the distant past we looked to those places we recognised and experienced in nature for ideas – the shelter of a cave, the shade of a tree, the original refuge of the womb, our own proud vertical stance and point of view, the communal circle we make with our friends in a forest clearing… – and sought to emulate them in our architecture.

The general argument is that metaphors live at the conceptual core of architecture; but those metaphors are of many and varied kinds, which change and grow as you try to pin them down.