Olympia Theater, Miami

At a high-priced Miami Beach hotel that promises zen-like serenity, there's a bathtub in the middle of each guestroom. As I lie on my Duxiana mattress, gazing toward the ceiling, my eyes come to rest on a tacky piece of plastic. It is an access panel — not for approaching nirvana, but for cleaning out the drain for the bathtub in the room above mine.

That a hotel in which every other surface is beautifully designed — with dark wood floors and silk-covered walls — could put so little thought into ceilings shouldn't come as a surprise. Ceilings have long been architecture's afterthoughts, the place where lights, sprinklers, speakers, smoke detectors and vents have coexisted in chaos.

It wasn't always so. One of the most famous works of art was a ceiling. And if not every building can be a Sistine Chapel, for centuries ceilings were carefully considered surfaces. Picture the ceiling of a Gothic cathedral, which is meant to evoke heaven — and, in the best cases, comes close. In humbler buildings, ceilings — whether made of mud in Arizona or ice in Alaska — were honest structures.

But in the twentieth century, ceilings dropped — not just in height, but status.

Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, Miami

There were good reasons, including safety (smoke detectors and sprinklers have to be overhead) and efficiency (if the ceiling was a flimsy panel, which could be punctured at will, plasterers and plumbers didn't have to show up on the same day). Somehow, the importance of ceilings was forgotten. Robin Standefer, a New York architect said, "People think they disappear, but they don't." She added: "I'm sitting in my office right now, and I see a lot of ceiling."

Some architects never succumbed; it's hard to imagine Frank Lloyd Wright or Alvar Aalto treating a ceiling as an also-ran. Hugh Newell Jacobsen, who has been designing elegant buildings since the 1950's, says, "Walls, floors and ceilings are the tools of my trade. If you mess up any one of them, you mess up the whole building." Yet too many architects allow confusion to reign overhead, letting speakers, lights and vents end up wherever they end up. Ceilings had become Swiss cheese.

Slowly, ceilings are regaining their stature. One reason is technology — which allows the same devices that became so obtrusive in the twentieth century to take new, sleek forms in the twenty-first. Another is a style of architecture — typified by the Pritzker Prize-winner Zaha Hadid — where walls, floors and ceilings form continuous surfaces; the dynamism of Hadid's work (this page) is visible whether you look up, down or around. Hadid isn't the only architect working to rescue ceilings from a century of ignominy. Their efforts are worth looking up to.