The title of this lecture may arouse false expectations. Some of you will have come hoping for a disquisition on high theory. If you have, you will be disappointed. This talk is not about linguistics or philosophy. It is not even about architecture. Probably I should have called it ‘buildings, words and the body’ or just ‘living with buildings’. Far from uniting three lofty academic disciplines, as the title seems to do, this paper seeks to remind us of what we have lost by operating with such distinct and lofty categories. Instead of celebrating the separate natures of building, talking and thinking, it endeavours to draw attention to their inseparability. If it succeeds you will by the end be more aware of the extent to which none of these activities can happen without the others being involved. What is argued is that the making of buildings and the experiencing of buildings are both associated with distinctive mental operations and that this association is apparent in our use of language. To put it another way, we use metaphors from architecture to articulate our thoughts because the processes of design and construction and the experience of using building relate to basic mental operations and basic psychological needs. In other words, when we derive from building design the metaphor ‘plan’, as in ‘five-year plan’, or from building construction the expression ‘foundations’, as in ‘foundations of economic theory’ or from the experience of a building once constructed the concept of ’pillars’, as in ‘pillars of society’, we do so because there is a uniquely close relationship between building and thinking. It is on this relationship that I want to reflect. Since the topic is as vast as the worldwide history of architecture and thought, I will probably not get very far this evening. But I hope at least to demonstrate its importance, not just for architectural historians, but for linguisticians and philosophers as well. As I will argue, the study of architectural metaphors sheds light equally on the history of architecture, the history of language and the history of thought.