How to mesure the quality of architecture?

Quality is one of architecture’s most persistent claims and one of its most fragile concepts. It appears everywhere: in awards, in procurement, in housing policy, in the hierarchies that decide what gets built, published, preserved, or forgotten. We name good architecture as if the term carried its own evidence. Yet the moment we try to define what quality is, we discover that the expression does not describe a stable property of buildings. It describes a judgment, and every judgment implies criteria; every criterion implies values, and every value implies a position.

To ask, How to measure the quality of architecture? is, therefore, to ask how architecture becomes legible as value, legible to institutions, to publics, to clients, to juries, and, more uncomfortably, to us. Measurement enters precisely where confidence fails, as it appears when intuition is no longer enough, when responsibility demands justification, when consequences require a rationale. But measurement also brings a particular danger as it assumes that architecture can be made comparable, that projects can share a scale, and that qualitative differences can be translated into commensurable terms. So, the question is not only whether architecture can be measured but what happens to architecture when it is forced into measurement.

Historically, architecture has always tried to name what makes it good, but it did so within very different conceptions of knowledge and authority. In De Architectura, Vitruvius proposes firmitas, utilitas, and venustas as an ideal synthesis. A building must stand, serve, and persuade. The formulation is often repeated as if it were timeless common sense. It frames architectural quality as a balance between the technical and the cultural, between the measurable and the felt, implying that architecture belongs simultaneously to the world of construction and to the world of representation.

In this sense, architecture is both a physical artefact and a system of signs through which societies articulate order, hierarchy, memory, and aspiration. As Roland Barthes noted when reflecting on the semiology of architecture, buildings are never merely objects of use; they are also carriers of meaning, read and interpreted like a form of language. For this reason, the Vitruvian formulation continues to haunt contemporary evaluation systems, as it assumes that architectural quality can only be understood across multiple registers at once.

We can also see this in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, where quality becomes inseparable from a theory of order and a theory of society. For Alberti, a building is not judged solely by its structural soundness or by its usefulness, but by the coherence of its parts within a larger cultural and civic order. This coherence is captured in the notion of concinnitas, the harmonious correspondence of parts whose proportions produce a form that appears both necessary and complete.

Within this, Alberti insists on convenienza and decoro, linking architecture to proportional systems, typological expectations, and the symbolic calibration of form. Temples, palaces, houses, and public institutions demand different formal languages because they occupy different positions within the symbolic order of society. A building is therefore good not simply because it is well constructed, but because its form is calibrated to its role within the civic fabric. In this sense, quality is also political.

The influence of this position would prove decisive for the architectural culture of the following centuries, where proportional systems and typological clarity became the principal instruments through which architectural judgement could be stabilised and transmitted. In the villas and palaces of Andrea Palladio, these Albertian principles would find a particularly lucid expression, transforming theoretical ideas of harmony and decorum into built compositions whose clarity of proportion made architectural quality appear almost measurable.

What begins to shift in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is the emergence of architecture as something that can be systematised, optimised, and compared across cases. Durand’s Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique reframes quality through economy of means, typological reasoning, and compositional logic—architecture as a rational system rather than a learned language. This is the arrival of a new epistemology that subverts the idea of function over ornament. Architecture becomes legible through diagrams, grids, and repeatable operations, and quality begins to align with efficiency, clarity, and the ability to produce coherent results under constraints. The modern desire to evaluate architecture through structured criteria begins here. The project is no longer a singular object judged by cultivated taste, but rather a solution that can be analysed, compared, and reproduced.

Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française and his broader theoretical work redirect the debate again, replacing the classical language of proportion with the moral language of truth. He associates quality with constructive logic, structural clarity, and the idea that form should emerge from the deep intelligence of materials and systems. Even his controversial theory on restoration reflects this conviction: restoring a building meant reconstructing the internal logic through which it had been conceived, sometimes projecting it toward an ideal state that history itself had never fully realised. To judge quality is to understand a building’s internal rationale.

Modernism inherits these tensions as Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture stages quality as a disciplinary reset. The good is no longer evaluated primarily through inherited codes, but through performance, standardisation, and the promise of a new everyday life. His later formulation of the Five Points of a New Architecture (first articulated in the mid-1920s) turns quality into a quasi-operational set—pilotis, free plan, free façade, ribbon windows, and roof garden. Architecture becomes a system of principles that can be tested and verified across contexts. In this sense, the modern project attempts to transform architectural judgment into something closer to a method: quality becomes legible through performance, spatial organisation, and the capacity of architecture to support new forms of collective life. Modernism does not abolish judgment but reorganises it around a new ethical and social horizon.

Frank Lloyd Wright, in texts such as The Natural House and his wider articulation of organic architecture, pushes against the mechanical metaphor with another kind of criterion: continuity, integrity, and a direct relationship between building, site, and material. For Wright, quality is not only a matter of formal composition but also of how a building sits in the landscape, how spaces unfold, and how materials express their nature. In this logic, architecture should not imitate nature as an image but participate in its logic. Construction, form, and everyday life must appear as parts of the same system. If Le Corbusier treats quality as a system that can be generalised, Wright treats quality as a system that must remain inseparable from place. Both, however, share the conviction that quality is no longer an implicit attribute of architecture, but a position that must be explicitly argued.

This is why Montaner’s insistence is so relevant today. There is no judgment of quality without an explicit theoretical framework. Across his writings on criticism and contemporary architecture, Montaner repeatedly argues that the values through which architecture is evaluated must be articulated openly rather than assumed as common sense. Cultural constructions, he suggests, should be stated, debated, and exposed to critique. In other words, the problem is not that quality judgment involves subjectivity; the problem begins when this subjectivity presents itself as neutrality, when criteria become ideology wearing the mask of technique.

The question of architectural quality becomes most pressing when architecture is asked to justify itself. Frank Gehry’s infamous dismissal of “98%” of contemporary buildings exposes not only frustration, but also a deeper crisis: the discipline often lacks a shared language for explaining what makes architecture good. When architects cannot articulate their own criteria, judgments are increasingly shaped by media, markets, and institutional expectations rather than by architectural discourse itself. In this context, measurement should not be understood as a search for objective certainty, but as a political act of making values explicit and taking responsibility for them.

This challenge has become even more urgent as quality shifts from a professional concern to a public policy objective. European initiatives such as the Architects Council of Europe, the New European Bauhaus, and the Davos Baukultur Quality System seek to establish broader frameworks that evaluate architecture through environmental, social, cultural, economic, and aesthetic dimensions. Yet these systems also reveal a contradiction: while they increasingly define what quality should be, they rarely verify whether buildings actually perform as intended over time. Awards and recognition often privilege narrative, image, and innovation over long-term performance, risking a culture where visibility becomes a substitute for genuine quality.

Ultimately, measuring architecture means more than producing metrics. It requires distinguishing between the spectacle of architectural representation and the lived reality of buildings. As Italo Calvino suggests, the truth lies not in the discourse but in the built environment itself, while Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that moments of beauty can emerge in the most modest works. Quality, therefore, should be understood neither as an abstract ideal nor as a prize, but as an ongoing commitment to creating places that endure, serve their communities, and reveal their value through experience over time.