TOWARDS the end of the 15th century a boy traipsing along a Roman hillside stumbled down a crevice and landed in a subterranean gallery. That dark grotto turned out to be the Emperor Nero’s first-century villa, or what was left of it. Nero’s successors, eager to rub out all traces of the hated ruler, had built over it, and the vast villa had been forgotten.

Nero’s Domus Aurea (“Golden House”) is one of the case studies in Tom Wilkinson’s “Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made”. Mr Wilkinson sets out to demonstrate the full complexity of a building. It takes on the personality of the people who built or occupied it, and its public image evolves in line with theirs.

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To illustrate his point, Mr Wilkinson (who teaches at University College London) uses examples as old as the Tower of Babel and the Great Mosque of Djenné in Timbuktu, and as recent as Oscar Niemeyer’s curved footbridge in Rio de Janeiro. He shows how each building has a meaning of its own, and how that meaning can change over time. The Tower of Babel, for example, is viewed today as the embodiment of vanity and arrogance. Yet for the Babylonians it was a handsome monument, topped by a temple, that was meant to be admired for its architecture.

As Mr Wilkinson points out, architecture is “the most inescapable of art forms”. It is quite possible to live without paintings and chamber music, but not without a roof overhead. “Bricks and Mortals” is likely to make readers more conscious of the structures they inhabit, work in and experience daily. It may not tell architects anything they do not already know, but for everyone else, it is a thought-provoking book.