Going to a school that teaches a strong classical background in their architecture program, I was taught to never use the word “style” to describe a building. If I needed to describe a building I was encouraged to describe the important attributes of the building or suggest where I drew my precedents from. The word “style” was never supposed to be used to characterize the building. Professors established the idea to encourage students to design in an open environment; to study the precedents and different periods of architecture to the fullest allowing the students to describe (or design) buildings without limiting their ideas to a generic characterization. While the idea helped many students understand their designs and their precedents much better, it is very hard to describe those ideas to a general society that understands traditional architecture through the names of standard styles that have been given to different periods, or types, of architecture. My question to all of you is: Does describing, or designing, within a style limit the quality of work that can be done? And in connection with that, should we use the word “style” at all when working with traditional design?