Walls are products of our minds, and incarcerate us. They soak up our lives, and give back blankness. They make for us extra 'skulls' in which to hide, and cells to shut things away. We depend on them, and yet resent our dependency. We see them as barriers to freedom and communality, but at the same time realise that those same barriers help us keep peace and sanity. Walls may aggravate our claustrophobic instincts, but they also comfort our innate agoraphobia. They have two sides to them, literally and metaphorically.

The wall is sometimes seen as the blank canvas of architecture, a surface onto which 'architecture' is applied. But it is much more than that. The wall itself is one of the most powerful instruments available to an architect. By the arrangement of walls the architect sets out the spatial matrices within which our lives are lived.

Social cohesion is really about walls as instruments of the minds of those who dispose and arrange them. It is about what walls can be used to do: how they interplay with the ways space, on the surface of the earth and under the sky, is occupied; how they contribute to and affect lived experience; how they help in orientation and the management of the world around.

Walls are agents and symbolic manifestations of the order, and the conflicts, of life in the world. In Nazareth, in 1999, the Muslim community decided to build a mosque alongside the Christian Basilica of the Annunciation. It seems to have been a political as well as a religious gesture, which upset the Christian community in the town and provoked unrest. Before work properly started on the building the Muslims took possession of the place, occupying it as if the mosque was already there. They marked out a square with curbstones, oriented to Mecca. Inside were carpets, outside was the tarmac of the car park site, with neat lines of shoes. The Muslims used this square of carpets as the mosque. On hot days it was shaded with cloth. Worshippers washed their feet and hands in nearby water troughs. The mihrab, the symbolic doorway to Mecca, was marked with a white plastic garden chair. Steps formed the minbar, the 'pulpit'. And the minaret from which the muezzin called the faithful to prayer was a scaffolding pole with loudspeakers attached. With all this in place the mosque already existed, but without a building. The essential elements of its architecture were there..., complete with the illusion of 'walls' psychologically as strong as any built barriers, but through which the statement of worship, and symbolic possession of place, could be displayed to the world.

This illustrates that walls are used by the designing mind to impose its intellectual structures on the world.  They are ubiquitous structures that influence and affect our experience of the world starting from the layout of walls in the abstraction of conventional architectural drawing.

Walls are primarily a surface to articulate our primitive and psychological relationship with boundaries as surfaces between space we can occupy and solid that we cannot.  Here we may speculate on the invention of some basic types of wall that have emerged in the occupation of caves, for example, the retaining wall, the partition wall, and the enclosing wall and notes some of the things they enable architects to do.  These social interactions led to roles played by walls in making artificial caves, and the emergence of related spatial geometries.

A consequence of the emergence of the artificial cave from its subterranean state, resulted in the exposing the outside surfaces of walls as screens for display, and allowing the manipulation of natural light in internal spaces.  There are many ways in which walls can be expressive: of location, tradition, culture, identity, status, imagination, aspiration, knowledge, sophistication, skill, resources... even philosophy, and a sense of humour.  In particular, there are many examples through the ages illustrating the different things walled enclosures have been used to do: concealment, protection, containment, orientation....

An important social role of walls is to prevent and channel movement, and to manipulate serial experience, as well as the ways they can enhance legibility by providing datums in built labyrinths to help people keep track of where they are.

Architects exploit the zone within walls, between 'inside' and 'outside'. In this connection they have tried to obscure the presence of walls, and ways they have created inhabited walls and modified walls to make them more functional in terms of the social requirements to control sound, heat and light. 

In all of the above senses, architecture is a 'bridge' between minds. At one level architects organise places for others to use; they construct  the social frames of people's lives. At another level, they indulge in communication with each other through their work, challenging competitors, impressing critics, and paying homage to those who have influenced them as they go. Both levels constitute the vitality walls as day to day agents of social cohesion and architects are important managers of space as an increasingly limiting resource.

This has been recognised by the UIA/UNESCO Charter for Architectural Education, which states:

"We, the architects, concerned by the future development of architecture in a fast changing world, believe that everything, influencing the way in which the built environment is made, used, furnished, landscaped and maintained, belongs to the domain of the architects. We, being responsible for the improvement of the education of future architects to enable them to work for a sustainable development in every cultural heritage, declare:

• That the new era will bring with it grave and complex challenges with respect to social and functional degradation of many human settlements, characterized by a shortage of housing and urban services for millions of inhabitants and by the increasing exclusion of the designer from projects with a social content.

• That architecture, the quality of buildings, the way they relate to their surroundings, the respect for the natural and built environment as well as the collective and individual cultural heritage are matters of public concern.
• That there is, consequently, public interest to ensure that architects are able to understand and to give practical expression to the needs of individuals, social groups and communities, regarding spatial planning, design organization, construction of buildings as well as conservation and enhancement of the built heritage, the protection of the natural balance and rational utilization of available resources.
• That methods of education and training for architects are very varied; this constitutes a cultural richness which should be preserved.
• That, nevertheless, it is prudent to provide a common ground for future action, not only in the pedagogical methods used, but also with the aim of achieving an appropriate elevated level, by establishing criteria which permit countries, schools and professional organizations to evaluate and improve the education given to the future architects.
• That the increasing mobility of architects between the different countries calls for a mutual recognition or validation of individual diplomas, certificates and other evidence of formal qualification.
• That the mutual recognition of diplomas, certificates or other evidence of formal qualification to practise in the field of architecture has to be founded in objective criteria, guaranteeing that holders of such qualifications have received and maintain the kind of training called for in this charter.
• That the vision of the future world, cultivated in architectural schools, should include the following goals: