The corridors of power, in business and government, lead to heroic interior spaces, and business has frequently appropriated the architecture of power—that is, of government. Interior spaces symbolize as well as contain function. The ambiguous relationship to nature is seen in the American desire to bring a scaled-down outdoors inside; the incorporation of the past takes different shapes.

The town square concept reappears in guises as diverse as the great interior space under the Capitol dome and the glazed-over shopping mall that is Houston's Galleria; hotels and museums with indoor plazas seek to provide the same sort of community meeting space. Grand Central Terminal—with twinkling stars painted on its concourse ceiling—is both the nexus of a transportation network and a grand bazaar. The Pennsylvania Academy of Art demonstrates how the effort to combine tradition, function, and the symbols of industrial modernity may wind up a mixed metaphor.

It took Frank Lloyd Wright to reconcile the dome of the pantheon and the arcaded market in the Marin County Civic Center. (58 minutes)