There is something majestic and spirit-inspiring about a building that is through-and-through true to its nature.

When the layers of structure and stone and form and function all intersect together in a great concert of human ingenuity and inventiveness express something that is, at minimum, profound and, perhaps, divine.

Such places center us within our individual self, within our current time and within our human-scape for we are simultaneously both grandly powerful and infinitely weak and always beautiful.

But, but when we extract labor, when we take away effort from the process of creation and invention and celebration then we merely have plastic camels and plasterboard arches. We have hollow things and hollow-ness.

Sure, the bottom line of business is well suited. Time is saved. But there is no place to sit and absorb that which makes life valuable.

I for one would find true connection to the indescrible and the sacred much more difficult at place where the veneer of commercialism poses as the skin of the sacred. Rather, I need a place that take me away from all places where I am accustomed to being. I need the old stones on which to walk where so many others have searched before me and not the fresh concrete that allows faster movement of larger crowds; I need small stalls in which to haggle and not the well lit halls of a mall; I need the smells of the market and not the piped music of the mall.

I need to go to the place and not have the place brought to me. This, for me, is the magic a building who nature is transform my thinking, feeling, believing and, therefore, my daily doing.