The search for an essential architecture has been a strong impulse in the various strands of twentieth-century architecture. The search is for a language of silence, an architectural language that may seem mute but carries the viewer along with it without wasting words, and without ambiguity. A serious idiom that relies on the power of the architectural material and has no room for playful, multi-layered meaning or rhetorical redundancies in its aspiration to authenticity. Where is this urge for simplicity coming from? How can it be explained against the prevalent background of popular imagery? Why this harking back the essential, material quality of architecture?