MY FAMILY went to Rome this summer, and we spotted the scene in the photo above in front of the Pantheon, which captures the theme of my new Daily News column.

Don't panic. Paying tribute to some important building is the opposite of what this column is going to be about.

The Pantheon was built by the Romans 1,900 years ago as a pagan temple and converted into a church in 609 AD. For 13 centuries, its famous dome, 142 feet across, was the largest in the world, only surpassed in 1436 by the Duomo in Florence. The Pantheon still has the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built.

The dome has been drawing admirers since the caesars. The Pantheon has always attracted lots of foot traffic, creating the lively exchange of goods and ideas that is the heart of cities.

And now we come to the purpose of this column, to be known as "Built."

The inscription in the above photo loosely translates as "My name is Pope Pius VII, and when I came here, this important space was filled with undistinguished eateries. But I cleaned it up, see?" And in one of those ironies you can't make up, the building under the inscription now houses a McDonald's.

Architecture is often treated as a topic beyond the ken of the uninitiated. And writing about design, whether it's carved in stone in Latin or in ink on newsprint, often feels like the real design is to keep people in their place.

That's fine for kings and popes, but democracy invites all of us to be architecture critics. We may not all read novels or watch movies or attend concerts or visit galleries. But we all live and work every day in the shelter of buildings, and we all move through streets or stations every day to get to the buildings that shelter us.

So architecture critics shouldn't be arbiters of taste, at least not in a democracy and certainly not on the pages of the Daily News. Architecture critics should be interrogators of taste, raising subjects and asking questions that provoke people to become thoughtful critics of their buildings.

I want Built to start conversations, not end them.

I won't flatter myself by saying I can do for architecture what Joe Sixpack has done for beer, but that's my goal. I want Daily News readers to develop a connoisseurship for their buildings like the one they have for their beer.

Readers of my old column know that my favorite subjects are the ones I'm still learning about. As a teacher, I have a great patience for temporary ignorance, and I know that the best way to learn is to ask the question you don't know the answer to.

I actually enrolled in architecture school as a 45-year-old. But Mayor Nutter twice asked me to take on jobs that required me to drop out, to focus on policy and sustainability.

Policy and sustainability connect with architecture and design in ways that are just now becoming clear. Consider: Buildings account for 75 percent of U.S. electricity use and about half of all U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions. Most of what we know about energy efficiency comes from designers and engineers who learned to build and operate smarter buildings.

ROME is full of ordinary people who treasure their buildings, not as monuments but as the spaces in which they live fully modern lives. So is Philadelphia.

It's been 100 years since anyone walked down the streets of Philadelphia and thought, This is the future. But Philadelphians are now building a city for the future using the assets we've inherited, mixed with the ideas we've pioneered. Built will bring you those stories.

Mark Alan Hughes teaches at PennDesign and Penn's TC Chan Center for Energy Studies. E-mail him at

mahughes@design.upenn.edu.