How does an architect come up with the “shape” of a house? From uninhabited physical and mathematical spaces or from cultural memory, in which this “form” is presented as the experience of life observations? Temple, palace, hotel, government building, office, library, museum, theater... The eidos of a designed house is an invariant of a particular architectural genre developed by a given culture; it is a tradition established in a given cultural area. By what signs do we recognize these architectural genres? Is there a poetics of housing, a poetics of educational institutions, a poetics of metro stations? Is a poetics of architecture even possible? The author of the book is Alexander Stepanov, candidate of art history, professor at the Institute. I. E. Repina, Associate Professor, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University.