Wilfred McClay, in Why Place Matters:

As Winston Churchill famously declared during the Second World War, as an intervention in the debate over whether Britain should rebuild the bombed House of Commons just as it had been before, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Churchill favored the complete restoration of the initial design, but for reasons that were as much functional as traditional — albeit a kind of mystical functionalism. He believed that the institutions of British parliamentary self-government had been made possible in crucial ways, ways that defied enumeration, by the specific physical structures within which Parliament grew and matured into its present role — even down to the shape and size and seating arrangements of its chambers. The space is ours to shape initially, but once we have filled and shaped it, it begins to take on a life of its own, as a place that molds us in turn. One tinkers with such places only at one’s great peril, particularly when the shaping has been done by many hands over the years. not only does it rattle the bones of the dead, but it may undermine the prospects of those yet unborn, and weaken us by burying memories that deserve to live.