Urban Scene : How to Be an Architecture Critic : Everyone can critique the buildings they experience and see how they affect our lives.

You employ stone, wood and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces--that is construction, ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say, “This is beautiful.” That is architecture.

--Le Corbusier

Architecture is the one art form no one can avoid.

You may choose never to view a painting, read a poem, see a play or movie, enjoy a ballet, concert or dance performance. But you cannot escape an encounter with a building of some kind almost every day.

Architecture is a social art, “society made visible,” as the saying goes, and every type of architecture--from office towers to private homes to sports arenas, shopping centers, factories, movie theaters, city halls or public museums--must serve people’s needs.

Everyone can be an architecture critic, to critique the buildings they experience every day, to understand how the architecture affects the way they live, feel and think about themselves.

The following seven questions will help anyone determine for themselves why a particular building is good or bad. They will help you make the same point-by-point review a professional critic does in evaluating the work of architects.

Caveat: Not all buildings designed by architects are architecture. And not all architecture is the work of architects.

Simon Rodia, who dreamed up the visionary architecture of the magic spires of Watts Towers--perhaps the single most imaginative structure in Los Angeles--was an unschooled Italian laborer.

How is this building organized as a functioning object?

How does the plan work? How do you find your way through the layout? How quickly can you grasp the organizational idea?

In a house, for instance, how do the rooms lead one into the other? Why, say, do you have to go through the kitchen to get from the living room to the master bedroom? Is there a reason for this curious arrangement or was is a poor piece of planning?

In a public building, such as a city hall, is it easy to find your way to the agency, department or official that you may be seeking? Is the front door clearly emphasized?

At Los Angeles City Hall, the elaborate forecourt and front door on Spring Street are rarely used by the public. The busy entry on Main Street is mean and muddled, and seems to lead nowhere. Standing in the lobby, there’s no way you can tell where all the officials who run our daily lives are lurking.

How well do the room shapes serve the plan? If the master bedroom in a house is long and narrow with a low ceiling, is this a comfortable or intimate space? If the lobby of your new city hall is three times as high as it is wide, is this sensible in relation to the way people circulate through the building?

Anyone who has attended a play at the Mark Taper Forum has shuffled through the crush in the curving, narrow foyer, which seems to be shaped for maximum confusion and discomfort. On the other hand, the Taper’s circular performance space is well proportioned to serve intimate theater-in-the-round.

What mood or atmosphere does the design evoke, intentionally or unintentionally

Designers can manipulate enclosures to make you experience a range of emotions, from awe to well-being, from terror to delight.

The ceiling of France’s Chartres cathedral is exaggeratedly high in terms of its simple function as a house of prayer. The vast amount of empty space above the congregation’s head is designed to lift its thoughts heavenward, to awe the mind with the infinity of divinity.

Augmenting space in this fashion is one of the simplest architectural devices for inducing a sense of amplitude. Oversizing a room, vertically or horizontally, implies that the person, religion or culture involved has material, social or spiritual resources to spare.

On the other hand, architecture can set out to more or less deliberately terrorize or dehumanize.

Hitler’s Nuremberg arena was designed to strike terror in the hearts of both supporters and foes of Nazism. The enclosed stadium space was Olympian, the architecture was brutally authoritarian in character and scale. The collective national will expressed in concrete was clearly meant to be greater than the destiny of any individual.

Closer to home, in the downtown Citicorp Plaza or Wells Fargo Center, the sleek, straight-up-and-down design of a typical office tower is meant to exalt the cool collective efficiency of modern commerce over the individuality of anyone who may work inside.

How well or poorly does the style chosen by the architect fit a building’s functional, emotional and symbolic purposes?

Beneath the shifting surface of architectural fashion lies the criterion of appropriateness, the measure of the way in which a style can enhance or diminish the effects an architect may seek.

The immense central atrium of the Bonaventure Hotel, for example, is clearly meant to create the sense of a safe, warm, self-enclosed world secure from the uncertainties of downtown streets. But the atrium’s style is so cold, its surfaces so confused, its proportions so overscaled, it may make you feel more disoriented than reassured.

Contrast this with the grand lobby of the Biltmore Hotel--the original lobby on Olive Street, not the new one on Grand Avenue--with its lofty painted ceilings and air of Andalusian grandeur. In this lively space you feel comfortably wrapped in a mantle of cultivated luxury.

It is important to remember that no architectural style is inherently more or less correct than any other.

Long despised by Modernists as “an architecture of mere surfaces,” 1920s Art Deco is now appreciated for its lively mannerisms, so well-suited to its charmingly frivolous purposes. The Art Deco design of a landmark like the Wiltern Theatre turns a cavernous auditorium into a fantasia of vivid decoration and movie-land magic.

Is the design all of a piece, from its smallest details to its grandest gestures?

Often a building will start out strongly then fade in the finish. The designer may have lacked the skill to carry through his concept, or he may have lost concentration somewhere along the way.

The design of a house’s front door should clue the visitor to the character of the spaces within. If the door details are elegant, your guests will expect to have it open upon an equally sophisticated living room. If the living room strives to convey an air of urbane elegance, why is there a suburban cottage cheese ceiling?

Does the building honestly express its purpose?

The character of the architecture should clue you to the activity that takes place inside its walls, even if that activity is considered to be ugly or distasteful.

A sewage plant or electricity generating station should not be disguised with fake mansard roofs and roses around the door in an attempt to hide a necessary but impolite function. On the other hand, a movie theater may legitimately resemble a Chinese pagoda or Moorish palace because it is inherently a home of fantasy.

Who would guess that the quaint Japanese teahouse in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area in Van Nuys stands in a pool of recycled waste water processed by the reclamation plant hidden away at the edge of the site? On the other hand, who could doubt the purpose of Frank Gehry’s Aerospace Museum in Exposition Park, advertised by the F-14 fighter jet suspended from its frontage?

Good architecture gains strength from an honesty of expression. Dishonest architecture that hides its purpose usually lacks conviction.

Does the building convey a true sense of place?

The best architecture appears inevitable in its location. It seems as if it was somehow always there, waiting to happen.

Who could imagine the Parthenon anywhere but on the Athens Acropolis? Could St. Peter’s be anywhere but the Vatican? Could the Katsura Palace be anywhere but Kyoto? Would the Chrysler Building look so right anywhere but in mid-town Manhattan? Where else would the Hollywood wedding cake architecture of Beverly Hills City Hall truly belong?

Asking these questions will start anyone on a sound evaluation of any kind of architecture. None requires a familiarity with the current “archibabble” fashionable among professional critics whose aims often seem to be more esoteric than enlightening.

Sharp words, such as context, idiom, vernacular, parti, parlante, etc. should be held well away from the body. Soft words such as humanity, honesty, usefulness, imagination, self-assurance and appropriateness should be embraced.

“You touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say, ‘This is beautiful.’ That is architecture. . . .”