In the same essay Eliot discusses analysis and comparison
as tools of literary criticism. These critical methods are
valid for architecture too: architecture is open to analysis
like any other aspect of experience, and is made more vivid
by comparisons. Analysis includes the breaking up of architecture
into elements, a technique I frequently use even
though it is the opposite of the integration which is the
final goal of art. However paradoxical it appears, and despite
the suspicions of many Modern architects, such disintegration
is a process present in all creation, and it is
essential to understanding. Self-consciousness is necessarily
a part of creation and criticism. Architects today are too
educated to be either primitive or totally spontaneous, and
architecture is too complex to be approached with carefully
maintained ignorance.