I remember being taken down a London street with an architect a while ago and being told to look up at the roof tops, and upper windows. I was quite amazed to see so many different architectural statements, even small statues, so high up most people rarely see them. It made me wonder why they were not put lower down, were they some secret amusement given to architects by architects.
It is much beloved of thriller writers to have spies who are trained to observe the less obvious, to see things from a side, an angle and be able to make use of the modern world to see further than other people. Designers are the spies of the arts. They secrete whole worlds into tiny spaces, make statements derived from centuries of design, talk to each other in their code and from the apparent chaos of materials, make something quite daring, quite beautiful, quite startling or utterly mundane.
These designers sculpt our living areas especially in cities which are all designed. Although the English countryside with its patchwork fields and woodlands have been designed for none of it is wholly natural anymore except a few areas of marsh, moor, fell and highland. Architecture is geometry meeting imagination, making living spaces and thinking spaces for people.
Above out heads is a whole world made by people we may be missing.