I was at Price Chopper the other day, picking up food for the week. The usual Wednesday evening routine. Walking home, I stopped dead in my tracks and dropped the bags I was carrying. There in front of me was the old Carpet Building on Toronto’s King Street West, towering majestically just beyond the CN railroad tracks. Cumulus clouds were overhead, the sun just beginning to set and the Carpet Building, five-storeys high, was a beacon of grandeur in beleaguered Parkdale.

I live near the Carpet Building, have been inside and walked around it, and loved it for many years. But I had never seen it in that light, from that perspective. It is this sort of serendipity that informs Harry Mayerovitch’s How Architecture Speaks: looking at something you have seen a million times before and, in a moment, it becomes something else entirely.

Mayerovitch’s book is about the psychological aspects of buildings. He writes in simple terms to explain the sublime. “This a door,” he begins. “It tells us to come in or keep out. Its size suggests that we are able to pass through it easily and the doorknob tells us how.” He carries on from there to explain buildings in terms of colour, texture, shape, sound, smell, as arbiters of rhythm and geometry, catalysts of emotion and disposition.

Even though he is writing about architecture, he is talking about intensifying perception, explaining ways to reconsider our surroundings and think about how buildings can change our mood, the way we walk, the way we think. The basic premise is: Our Cities = Our Selves; we are our architecture – I need shelter, therefore I am. For instance, we walk differently on checkered floors than we do across chevrons. Checkers put a bounce in our step, chevrons push us forward and provide markers to determine distance. Multifarious ideas made obvious.

The 86-year-old Mayerovitch isn’t saying anything new, but he is saying what architects know, or are supposed to know, in a new way. I found myself nodding and murmuring Yes! Yes! through the entire book, and thinking how glad I was that someone had put it down this way. The book looks like a grade-school primer, with no more than a few sentences per page – an effective, user-friendly way of inviting the reader to skim it in less than an hour.

Occasionally, Mayerovitch’s clarity edges too close to cuteness, with some analogies threatening to override the insightfulness of what he is writing. In discussing roofs, he offers: “A judge’s wig earns him more respect than his bald pate…. Rupunzel’s tresses were her crowning glory.” It is Mayerovitch’s maladroit illustrations that make the book appear goofy. They should be used only as guides to think up better and real examples from our own environments. And that is, of course, the whole idea.