I take a lot of pictures of buildings and use a tripod a lot. This is mainly because I use a tilt shift lens, which has no autofocus, so I originally found it useful to do manual focus, using the screen on the back and zooming in. It also helps getting the camera level, to keep the verticals, vertical and make it simpler to correct any verticals in lightroom, when I have to tilt the camera up to get the top of the building in the picture. I use a 3 way head to get the camera level. It's fiddly with a ball head.
I also prefer to shoot at iso100 whenever possible, as the noise quality is much better. So the tripod allows much slower shutter speeds, which are usually too much for hand held shooting. I often end up taking pictures in evenings too, because of better light and availability of time. Sometimes I stay in one place and combine a few images to combine daylight, sunset, darkness/lights shots, so the tripod is fundamental to keeping everything lined up.
As well as all that, I was always hoping to upload any pictures to stock agencies, so detail, sharpness and focus were important. I was a bit paranoid about getting rejected by quality control.
More recently, on sunny days, I have become better at getting focus on the tilt shift, without the screen and can keep the shutter speed short to hand hold. Although it's pretty hard to keep things straight. But less noticeable if the camera is tilted a bit anyway. The advantages of this are avoiding hassle from security/ workers/ random people that comes with setting up a tripod and getting more images of more buildings in the available time. However the light is obviously different at these times, which affects the final image and the images are often harder to edit than tripod produced ones and sometimes may not be as detailed or well balanced.
I also tried to mix up the tilt-shift with a 50mm, which is quite fast and has autofocus, so can work without a tripod, but more importantly get some closer images of parts of buildings and interesting perspectives.
Overall, I prefer to use a tripod, but I find a tripod attracts attention and makes it difficult to access some locations.
