It would seem that Vitruvius, influenced by the explosion of intellectualism surrounding him of which ancient Greece is known for, has already taken the liberty of organizing his triad into a hierarchy for us, according to his understanding of what architecture, his brainchild, should prioritize . Ranking the importance of each component in the triad depends on the philosophy with which a work of architecture is being examined. In the most rigorous understanding of architecture, stability would be the integral quality of a building (what is the point of a structure if it cannot retain the shape it was designed to hold), followed by utility (a building is built to serve a purpose and allow a program), then beauty (if you are going to build it, it might as well look good while serving its purpose), as Vitruvius has arranged it. That prioritization however, is merely a reflection of one approach to understanding architecture, rather than a reflection of truth. I believe that an approach could be justified in the inverse order where beauty (which, in the confines of the triad’s categorizing of architecture into three qualities, I interpret to encompass both the aesthetic and theoretical value of a building) could be the guiding principle, whereas stability, while necessary in nearly all cases, is necessitated, but prioritized last, and where utility and program is second only to the personality and life a building takes on when it realizes the ambition of its creator.