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Behind the seemingly ordinary life of a practising architect lies a whole host of non-professional impulses that give shape to buildings. Stories of Storeys: Art, Architecture and the City is about these impulses and conditions—social, literate, personal and political—which are expressed, but often ignored in architecture. Bhatia looks at the ordinary, physical, visible and tactile involvement of our urban environment and the way it affects, communicates with, or influences us. An all-inclusive sociology of architecture, the book draws on the social life of some of architecture’s role players, people whose peculiar demands on design have come to characterize the building environment of our times, and times that are characterized by this progressive isolation of architecture from the society of common people.

Contents: 1. Introduction. 2. Reading the City. 3. City in Decline. 4. Public Architecture. 5. Architecture Definitions. 6. The Architect. 7. Architecture in the City. 8. Practice. 9. Architecture and the Bureaucrat. 10. Architecture as Style. 11. Architect as Builder. 12. The Home Owner. 13. Architecture Consumer. 14. Architecture in Urbanism. 15. Urban Art. 16. City Cosmopolitan. 17. City Space. 18. Architecture as Luxury. 19. Architecture as Commerce. 20. City History. 21. Architecture as Landscape. 22. Art as Politics. 23. Greening Architecture. 24. Architecture as Photoshop. 25. Architecture as Idea. 26. Art as Idea. 27. A Future Imagined.