“Architecture is an art, but we cannot view it only through an aesthetic lens,” said The New Yorker’s architecture critic Paul Goldberger. “If you think things are simple—black and white—you’ll never really get architecture.” Goldberger reminded the Institute audience that architecture also relates to how people live, to sociology, to culture, and even to finance. In other words, architecture is not only an object to admire; it is highly functional.

And it’s a process that is happening at breakneck speed in Beijing. Goldberger spoke of the alacrity with which buildings are conceived, designed, and erected in China; it’s what happens when an autocracy sets its sights on project rather than a democracy. “Beijing makes Houston look like a paragon of rational planning,” he said, adding that “it is astonishing the speed at which China has replicated our mistakes.”

Goldberger acknowledged the lack of aesthetics in the growing ex-urban sprawl seen across America—the “monoculture.” Still, when pressed by moderator Dana Gioia, director of the Institute’s Harman-Eisner Program in the Arts, Goldberger was also surprisingly sanguine about the future of architecture in America. He said that time creates the diversity of building styles and neighborhoods that make cities exciting, not the place itself. “Sometimes time is the most powerful shaper of a place,” Goldberger said. “It’s the accidents that happen in a city: serendipity through propinquity. … Architecture is a dialectic between generations.”