Though architecture has often cast itself as the foreground of urban ecology, history has proven time after time that architecture functions to a great degree in the background of our urban landscape. In fact, because it is not the centerpiece of concern for most of our daily human lives, architecture should not be viewed as a character but an environment within which its inhabitants are grounded to reality. This is a thesis in which we question the role of a building in the standard architectural process of the twenty-first century; how architecture-as-background to the urban environment might result in a paradigmatic shift away from the image-centric viewpoint we currently have.