Art is our shortcut to philosophy - as writer Ayn Rand says, "it concretises man's fundamental view of himself and of existence ... it conditions or stylises man's consciousness by conveying to him a certain way of looking at existence."
 
It does this, she says, "by a selective recreation of reality." Art, she argues, "isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represent man's fundamental view of himself and of existence. Out of the countless number of concretes - of single, disorganised and (seemingly) contradictory attributes, actions and entities - an artist isolates the things which he regards as metaphysically essential and integrates them into a single new concrete that represents an embodied abstraction."
 
The crucial importance of the artistic experience" is not in what he learns from it, but in that he experiences it. The fuel is not a theoretical principle, not a "didactic message," but the life-giving fact of experiencing a moment of metaphysical joy - a moment of love for existence."
 
So, I hear you ask, how does architecture perform this crucial role?