Below, Michael Murphy shares five key insights from his new book, Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live.
Michael is an architect, educator, and founder and president of AMMA, a design and development collaborative focused on the ways in which space shapes minds, bodies, and communities. In 2007, he founded the architectural non-profit firm, MASS Design Group, and was CEO until 2022. He is currently the Thomas Ventulett Chair of Architecture at The Georgia Institute of Technology.
What’s the big idea?
The most transcendent beauty architecture can reveal may not lie only in the building we see. It may lie in the systems which that building helps bring into alignment, quietly reshaping the world so that it works more fully, and more humanely, for everyone.
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1. Buildings are not neutral.
Architecture is often treated as background scenery to life—something static, technical, or purely aesthetic. But buildings are never neutral. They are living, functioning things.
The spaces we inhabit shape how we move, relate to one another, and even understand ourselves. A hospital can isolate patients or connect them to family and caregivers. A school can reinforce hierarchy or cultivate curiosity. A prison can deepen despair or open the possibility of rehabilitation. Buildings can hurt us. But they can also heal us.
Architecture operates almost like an invisible social contract. The way a building is designed quietly communicates values: who belongs here, who is welcome, and who is not. Once you notice this, buildings stop being background scenery and start becoming active participants in society. As I write in the book:
“Buildings are not neutral containers for human life. They are instruments that shape how life unfolds within them—guiding movement, framing relationships, and quietly reinforcing the values of the societies that build them. Architecture can isolate us or connect us, diminish dignity or restore it. The question is never whether buildings affect us, but how.”
Architecture is not simply about designing structures. It is about designing the conditions in which human life unfolds.
2. Repairing buildings can repair people.
My own journey into architecture didn’t begin in a design studio. It began when my father was dying. After his cancer diagnosis, I returned home and began restoring the unfinished attic of our family house. We stripped paint, opened walls, and slowly turned a neglected third floor into living space.
At first, it felt like simple construction: measuring boards, hammering nails, repairing surfaces that had been neglected for decades. At the time, I thought I was repairing a building. But something deeper was happening.
“Each small repair created a sense that life was still unfolding.”
The act of rebuilding the house gave my father purpose at a moment when the future felt uncertain. Each small repair created a sense that life was still unfolding. The house became a place where hope quietly returned, where the act of making something better suggested that tomorrow might still exist. The house was shaping us as we shaped it.
Architecture is not just technical work. It is emotional infrastructure. The spaces we inhabit influence how we experience hope, belonging, and memory. A home is not simply a container for family life—it is an active participant. Sometimes restoring a building becomes a way of restoring ourselves.
3. The spaces that shape us most are often the most ordinary.
Architecture history tends to celebrate spectacular buildings, like cathedrals, museums, and iconic skyscrapers. But the buildings that shape our lives most powerfully are far more ordinary: homes, schools, hospitals, prisons, workplaces. These are the spaces where we form our identities, where societies quietly teach their values, and where systems of power become visible in everyday life.
In Our World in Ten Buildings, I explore ten building types that quietly structure human life. Each one reveals something about the systems around us. The home is the first environment that teaches us what the world feels like. Neuroscientists have shown that our brains respond deeply to qualities like symmetry, balance, warmth, and enclosure in the spaces around us. The feeling we call “home” is not just emotional—it is architectural.
Schools offer another example. Their layout determines whether learning feels hierarchical or collaborative. Corridors and classrooms quietly structure the movement of knowledge and authority. Workplaces shape how people interact, innovate, and compete. Hospitals reveal systems of care and inequality. Prisons reveal systems of justice and power.
For years I assumed the harsh architecture of American prisons—steel bars, concrete cells, fluorescent lighting, and isolation—was inevitable. It seemed like the natural form of punishment. But when I visited prisons in Norway, I encountered something radically different: spaces designed around dignity, daylight, and reintegration. Kitchens were shared. Windows opened to the landscape. The architecture assumed that people would one day return to society. That experience forced me to confront a difficult realization. As I write in the book:
“Architecture’s greatest influence is rarely found in the extraordinary building that attracts attention. It lives in the ordinary ones we pass through every day—the school corridor, the hospital ward, the prison cell. These spaces quietly shape our habits and expectations, revealing what a society truly believes about human dignity and human possibility.”
Ordinary buildings form the moral architecture of everyday life. They show us, often more honestly than monuments ever could, what a society believes about justice, care, belonging, and human worth.
4. Architecture is the structure of memory.
Architecture is not only about the present, but also about memory. Buildings become vessels for the stories we carry as individuals and as societies. They accumulate the traces of lives lived: worn stair treads, faded paint, rooms where families gathered, spaces where history unfolded. A building quietly absorbs the experiences that take place inside it, holding them long after the people themselves have gone.
But the philosopher Gaston Bachelard goes even further. In The Poetics of Space, he argues that memory itself is spatial. Our minds organize experience the way houses organize rooms. We remember life as if moving through spaces: attics of imagination, basements of fear, hallways of transition, hidden closets of forgotten things. In this way, architecture does not merely contain memory. It helps produce it.
“Our minds organize experience the way houses organize rooms.”
Our neurochemistry and patterns of thought are shaped by the spaces we inhabit. Contemporary research in neuroaesthetics suggests that our brains respond measurably to spatial qualities like light, symmetry, proportion, and enclosure. Certain spaces generate calm and belonging; others produce anxiety or disorientation. Environments of awe—vaulted ceilings, sacred rooms, sweeping vistas—activate neurological responses tied to wonder, collective identity, and emotional meaning.
The spaces we inhabit therefore do not simply hold our memories. They help structure them. Architecture, in this sense, becomes part of the architecture of the mind itself.
5. Buildings are both fossils and fortune-tellers.
If architecture structures memory, it also reveals something larger: the systems that produced it and the futures those systems once imagined. Buildings are both fossils and fortune-tellers.
They are fossils because they preserve the systems that created them. Political decisions, economic forces, cultural assumptions, technological infrastructure, and environmental pressures all leave their traces in architecture. Zoning laws become street grids. Healthcare systems become hospital wards. Justice systems become prisons.
Every wall, corridor, and window carries the imprint of the society that produced it. Some buildings make this relationship between architecture and memory especially visible. Memorials are among the most powerful examples.
A memorial is a kind of architectural fossil. It preserves a moment in history while making the systems that produced that moment visible. In projects like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery—and in many of the memorial projects I have been involved in—architecture becomes a way of translating historical systems into spatial experience. Visitors do not simply read history; they move through it.
“Every wall, corridor, and window carries the imprint of the society that produced it.”
But architecture also looks forward. Buildings are fortune-tellers because they attempt to anticipate and shape the future. When architects design a school, they imagine how knowledge will circulate. When they design housing, they imagine how communities will form. When they design civic space, they imagine how democracy might function. Architecture becomes a tool for changing systems precisely because it shapes the containers in which those systems operate. As I write:
“Architecture is never just a container for life. It is the structure that organizes how life unfolds—how people gather, how institutions function, how power circulates. Change the container, and you begin to change the system.”
This is where architecture’s greatest potential lies. Design can become a convening force—bringing together philanthropists, community leaders, policymakers, designers, and institutions around shared spaces that catalyze change. When these groups align around the design of a place—a school, a hospital, a memorial, a neighborhood—they are not simply constructing a building. They are reorganizing the systems that shape everyday life.
The buildings we create today will eventually become the fossils of our present. But if we design them with intention—bringing together those with resources, imagination, and responsibility—they can also become the fortune-tellers of a more just future: spaces that help transform the systems of our world so that they serve humanity better.
When we evaluate buildings, we often begin with beauty. We look at form, proportion, materials; the elegance of a façade or the drama of a skyline. Beauty has long been architecture’s most visible language and the first measure by which buildings are judged. But beauty is only one way to evaluate architecture.
For more than two thousand years, architects have returned to a principle first articulated by the Roman thinker Vitruvius: that great architecture balances strength, usefulness, and beauty:
- Strength belongs to engineering—the systems that allow buildings to stand.
- Usefulness belongs to social life—how spaces support the ways people live, gather, and care for one another.
- Beauty belongs to art—the emotional and symbolic power that gives buildings meaning.
Too often we treat these qualities as if they compete with one another: beauty versus function, aesthetics versus responsibility. But the deeper challenge of architecture is not choosing between them. It is learning to hold them in symbiotic tension. As I write in the book:
“Architecture succeeds when beauty, usefulness, and strength stop competing and begin working together. The building becomes not just an object but a negotiation between culture, climate, and human life.”
If we expand our criteria for what makes a great building—looking beyond appearance or capital alone—we may discover a deeper beauty beginning to emerge. Not only in the building itself, but in the systems that surround it.
When development, financing, policy, design, and community priorities begin working together in service of human life, the architecture they produce reflects something larger than form. The systems themselves begin to take on elegance—a coherence that architecture has always sought.
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