Building as icon.

SIR: If we aren't to worship false icons, we have to discover the truth about buildings somehow. It's generally held that this is only possible through first-hand experience, but such truth exists only for intended users. This is particularly so with domestic architecture where firsthand experience is only possible by owning the rights to experience it. An hour or two visiting, say, Wright's Kaufmann House is no substitute for having been Mr Kaufmann, going there year after year, watching the leaves change colour, hearing the ice crack as the water falls again. Mr Kaufmann Jr giving his house to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy may have made lesser levels of experience more accessible, but it also ensured the real experience remained his family's alone. For ever. You get what you pay for.

And pay we do. When a building is labelled an icon, use and user are no longer the main event. It becomes valid to visit, say, the New York or Bilbao Guggenheim and give scant attention to what it houses. The contents merely let the icon-worshipping architectural tourist believe he is an intended user when increasingly, he already was. While it may not be fashionable to speak of architecture as art, it most definitely is if the experience of it can have its value inflated and sold for the price of entry. Ingeniously, the hireable top floor of Swiss Re dispenses with contents altogether.

Virtual architecture detaches architectural experience from these unsavoury associations with commerce. The downside is that the building exists only as the representation of it and this is the problem with photographs. They exist as virtual architecture but are perceived as virtual experience. They give us ideas of buildings that in reality are sometimes more, sometimes less. This is not a bad thing. Corbusier's Villa Stein is more attractive as an idea, devoid of the Steins' hideous furniture. Photographs of domestic architecture that include people become lifestyle advertisements that find their natural place in magazines and Sunday supplements.

Whether peopled or not, photographs remain poor conveyors of smells, textures, sounds and motion. Words attempt to compensate by obsessing about material, spatial and contextual qualities that elude the lens but, even when presented in conjunction with photographs, the results are inadequate. We should be thankful for this, for if they weren't, the experience of architecture would be seriously devalued and along with it our product.

Yours etc

GRAHAM MCKAY

London SW11 3NR