We have to turn architecture upside down: architecture is primarily an intensely intellectual and technical discipline, art comes only later. The danger with the concept of buildings that look good, as pieces of art, is that they usually do so only when new, when they are most able to shock and excite - but for how long? Part of the visual excitement with a building is its novelty value, and how it appears in photographs. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it has a strict shelf life. I agree with Jeremy Till that good buildings are critically shaped by the human and temporal dimensions: how people use them and how they can be adapted over their lifetime. I just hope that his cry for "weird shit" does not receive its welcome in literal terms, so that people design simply to shock. Most buildings are meant to last, so it is important that they remain useful: adaptable according to the needs of the beings who use them.
GH Galal
London

Modern architecture largely sucks, whether it's the toytown clock-tower of out-of-town stores, the cold clinical emptiness of modernism, or the brand new house that I live in. My house is like most new developments: probably looked pretty on architects' plans, but a nightmare to live in. Why not orientate the house towards the sun? Why is there no entrance lobby? One cannot greet or say goodbye to visitors at the door. There are no storage spaces or fireplace. My lifestyle is being dictated here - basically, go to work, have no friends round, don't have any clutter, don't grow your own food, and stare at the telly, not the fire, in the evening. Buildings need to be designed to look good and feel good for the people using them. They need to generate harmony and inspire people to relate to space, light and ambience. And definitely lots more weird shit please. More sensuous curves, more unusual materials, more humour, and more risk-taking.
Stefan Batorijs
Devon

So the RFH and the NT are great buildings not because of how they "look" but because of the spatial empowerment they afford their unseeing users. Jeremy Till has famously put down the British Museum Great Court as an airport check-in. Is this because it doesn't have enough beggars to please him, or because he's nearly blind? Maybe Canary Wharf underground station is more to his taste, or is its spatial empowerment too straightforward, too like the BM reading room, perhaps? The pictures of the straw-bale house suggests it's a fun piece of narcissistic expressionism. Maybe it's too much fun for Foster, but Rogers, bless him, can still do "fun". Wasn't the plastic dome and its rainbow chill-out space evidence of his office's sentimental attachment to hippydom and archigram?
Gordon MacLaren
London

Architecture is an art, and an older one than the other visual arts, but it needs to reinvent itself continually. Most of the rubbish bought and sold as private housing in this country (the majority of which has never seen an architect anyway) is proof of our inability as a society to comprehend architecture. The failure to recreate the house in Britain is probably the greatest failure of the last 200 years, but we largely seem so blissfully unaware of it, despite the fact that we have to put up with its failure daily. I originally intended to train as an architect, but chose theatre design, partly because of the length of architectural training and the uncertainty whether one would ever get to build anything of real interest.
David Cockayne
Nottinghamshire

Having grown up on a council estate I've come to realise that architecture has to be about the people who use the space whether living or working in it. Exterior looks, design, materials, finishes, aesthetic value, they are all well and good, but if it isn't a place where people, feel comfortable then what use is it to anyone other than the architect and idiot people who paid for it. Architects need to get out of their pretty little open plan worlds and get down into the nitty gritty of people's lives, what do we require our buildings do, and not just incorporate it into the work, but make it the purpose of the work. Beautiful buildings lift the soul and inspire awe, but people who work and live with those buildings, make them come alive. In the end buildings and architecture is about making people comfortable and sheltered from the outside environment, all the rest is just so much bells and whistles.
Andrew Green
London

Architecture is undoubtedly an art form but distinguished by being a useful art. Looking good on its own is therefore not sufficient. The architecture of the 20th century was distinguished from that of the late 19th century by being related first of all to the brief - the uses of the building - rather than to any imposed "style". Early modernism sometimes took a limited view of function, but much good architecture of the 20th century has expanded and enriched the definition of function to include the appropriate "feel" of the building, the use of light and space, the experience of entering, and the creation of spaces which, without dictating behaviour, offer a range of opportunities for the users. Given his concern for the feel of buildings, I am surprised that Jeremy Till dismisses Vetruvius' "commodity, firmness and delight". Far from dumbing down, these can surely be seen as representing the highest aspirations for architecture. Looking good is, or should be, an important part of any brief. The danger however, is that it can become an end in itself, a triumph of style over substance - not an option for seriously good architecture.
David Mellor
Bristol

I agree with most of what Jeremy Till said to Stephen Moss in Bricks and Mortals. Looks matter but character prevails. The architecture of any building is achieved when the spaces of the building evoke powerful emotions in tandem with its purpose. Without people and the experience and reaction to spatial arrangement, architecture would not exist. This is too often forgotten when studying the subject. Lecturers of architecture should review the dated method of teaching the subject and begin to realise there is not one architecture (the building) but architectures.
Matthew Gansallo
Tate Britain, London