Architecture is a reflection of the progress made towards understanding the consciousness of the built environment; of its limitations, potentials, needs and aims within our own period of time.  Architecture gives us insight into this process because it is so bound up in the life of a period as a whole.  Everything in it, from the fondness for certain shapes to the approaches to specific building problems which it finds most natural, reflects the condition of the age from which it springs.  It is the product of all sorts of factors; social, economic, scientific, technical and ethnological.