It sounds like a pompous thing to say, but our cities really are man's greatest works of art. They're vibrant, living spaces that re"ect the national dynamism and that's what attracts people to them.

Yet when it comes to understanding what cities and the buildings in them are for, we as a nation seem obsessed with the notion of zoning. As members of the public we're concerned about the height, the materials, how it affects the skyline and so on. We're far less interested in what the building contributes. For example, suddenly there's a rash of mobile phone shops, not just on O'Connell Street in Dublin. They're everywhere, but how many mobile phone shops do we need?

This isn't the case in other cities. In many European cities, for example, they don't allow commercial considerations to take precedence. For example, in Salzburg, Lisbon or Rome, many MacDonald's restaurants, which are the classic example, have been discreetly housed so that their business doesn't blare out onto the street, destroying the individuality of the building or the character of the street.

The result is that our city centres and towns are starting to become indistinguishable from any street anywhere. All you see are shops you might "nd on any high street in Britain. Planners are starting to talk more about micromanagement, and planning does give consideration to usage, but the current trend arises out of the situation 15 to 20 years ago when there was a dearth of activity and an 'anything-happening-in terms-of-building-is agood-thing' attitude prevailed.

But there is something distinct about Irish towns and cities and we should be careful to preserve this cultural aspect as well as respecting the commercial aspect of development. I'm not saying that we should have Georgian-style streets everywhere, or that all shops should be 'ye olde worlde'. But we need to look at buildings on more levels, and not just apply blanket commercial solutions.

Our attitude to buildings is a bit like the Booker Prize . . . if we haven't read the book and we don't like the cover, we say it's no good.

Take the Civic Of"ces in Dublin: they were criticised for looking like a Scandinavian petrol station initially, but that criticism failed to take on board more than mere external details. It didn't re"ect the fact that the civic of"ces addressed new development along the quays, created a new public space, created a new walk way from the quays as well as providing mixed usage. There's more to a building than a 'what-I-see' approach. Our understanding of buildings is a little bit super"cial, and we need to go a little bit deeper to look at uses, connections. . . there's a whole range aspects to understanding buildings And that's a criticism that can be levelled at architects . . . we, as a profession, haven't really contributed to a greater understanding of the uses of buildings. And we need to do more to address this.

The recent Open House event was a good start. It offered the public a glimpse behind the facade of buildings that are usually closed to the public and the opportunity to experience architecture and to see our built environment in a different way.