In an era pre-occupied by "starchitecture" and the dominance of global cities, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger makes a persuasive case for the importance of workaday structures and the limitations of urban planning. "I don't buy the notion that you can draw a clear line between great architecture and ordinary buildings," he said Friday during the Canadian Urban Institute's Designing Cities symposium. "Each structure has something to say about the culture that built it." Goldberger has just released a new book entitled, "Why Architecture Matters" (Yale), in which he sets out to mine the meaning of Winston Churchill's famous aphorism, "We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us." 
 Architecture, observed the Roman builder and engineer Vitruvius, encompasses "commodity, firmness and delight," and Goldberger, a Pulitzer Prize winner, cites this enduring definition to point out the paradox at the core of the most visible of all art forms. A building has to be "both useful and the opposite of useful," he says. "It makes sense to think of architecture as both great masterpieces and daily experiences... Sometimes, it is the average [building] that tell us the most." The current recession, he said during an interview with me on Friday (the full conversation will be available on Spacing Radio on the December 7th episode), has dampened demand for good design. "In the very short term, we're going to struggle to have architecture at all." Looking beyond the recovery, however, Goldberger feels the next wave of architecture will focus on the need for highly flexible design that recognizes the changing nature of family life. He also predicts that sustainable design "will become so taken for granted that we'll stop talking about it." Goldberger further argues that bold experiments such as New York's High Line, Broadway's new "piazza" and the West Toronto RailPath mark a distinct trend in the way cities are thinking about the purpose of open space. "We've viewed public space as being about stasis — it's where you sit and don't move." With cities lacking both money and space to create new Central Parks, they are looking instead to linear parks as a means of re-claiming waterfronts or aging infrastructure. "Cities are about movement and circulation as much as anything else," he observes. "We're looking at places of movement as being public spaces."