Architecture is the professional enterprise which contracts to build a structure, ostensibly as an accommodation or shelter, but principally as a concrete statement about the ruling influence which the client aspires to. A proclamation of power is the evident assertion of every bank, fort, church, mansion, government building and sky-scraper that has ever been constructed. From the most outrageously pretentious structures, to the most modest of alterations, the statement introduced by an architect incorporates sufficient elements to ensure that the substance, import and power of the client can be readily appreciated. Such is the case with military power, power over the environment, power to manipulate economic resources, religious power over the beliefs and behaviour of peoples and ordinary old success at accumulating assets. The affliction of tourism is frequently precipitated by an uncontrolled compulsion to view diverse exotic architectural remnants, in an attempt to stimulate a rush of awe at the fossils of an extinct power.

Simple peripatetic nomads, troglodtytes, and do-it-yourself mud-huters don't need architects. It is only when an individual or group acquires sufficient resources to be able to contract out the construction of a building, that the overseeing designs and supervision of the architectural species becomes a plausibility.

Educational institutes of architecture are established in order to devise certain forms, which are then promoted to a pliant populace, as being symbolic of a contemporary style. Architecture as an arena of endeavour however, can classify itself as much as it likes into the various schools of rationalism or modernism or brutalism or whatever, and bandy about the parameters of form and function and materials and so on, until it talks itself into believing in its own significance, but the over-riding consideration for every project is nothing more nor less, than the desire of the client to put on a visible display of self-serving aggrandizement.

Architecture, as an expression of power, may indeed reflect upon the requirements of design and function as a secondary consideration. Some thought at least, needs to be given to considering how the defenders of a fort, the servants of a bank, or the members of a church might live within their confines. Nevertheless, it is the magnitude and symbols of power, impregnability and permanence, that are the primary considerations for an architecture that contracts to deliver to its clients a realization of their pretensions. Once design takes over as the prime consideration, and the comforts and conveniences of the users becomes uppermost, then the activity ceases to be architecture and has become an exercise in pragmatism. It has become pragmatecture.