Architecture, space, and cognition

Since ancient times, cities and towns have incorporated dominant architectural features as a means of signaling the priorities of civic and/or elite populations, as a way of making apparent the hierarchy of popular or imposed institutions, whether religious, governmental, or technological in nature. Often it has been architectural features, such as the degree of decoration displayed on buildings, combined with the relative size of functionally specific structures, that have been used as a way of signaling this order of priority, where building size has been especially important in communication over distance. Traditionally, the term “skyline” referred to a line in the distance where the earth and sky met. Today, the term has come to represent those buildings of a town or city visible at a distance on the horizon (Kostof 1991: 279). More often the prominent buildings influence how a city is perceived, signaling the prevailing social and/or political order of the time. For instance, in modern societies it is the secular architecture of enterprise that now dominates the landscape of most cities, where corporate skyscrapers now overshadow the religious architecture of churches and cathedrals (Kostof 1991: 280–294). In the ancient past, funerary monuments and temple architecture outshone all other forms, the most prominent being the Ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the temples and pyramids of Egypt and Mesoamerica.