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Architecture: A World History
Lavishly illustrated and super-condensed, A World History is the perfect gift for any architecture buff. In this pocket-sized book bursting with 600 illustrations, page after page is dedicated to significant architectural movements, time lines that explore the evolution of the practice, and capsule biographies of great architects and examinations of their masterpieces.
Organized chronologically, the book travels from prehistory to the present, highlighting noteworthy examples of important architectural styles, and showcasing the work of significant architects, including Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas. From the pyramids of Egypt to the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower to the Glass House, A World History takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the most spectacular examples of architecture from around the world and throughout time.
Organized chronologically, the book travels from prehistory to the present, highlighting noteworthy examples of important architectural styles, and showcasing the work of significant architects, including Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas. From the pyramids of Egypt to the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower to the Glass House, A World History takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the most spectacular examples of architecture from around the world and throughout time.
512 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 10, 2017
Architecture: A World History provides a broad and comprehensive foundation to the intersection of architecture and history, exploring how architecture has been affected by factors social, political, intellectual, religious, and economical, and probing the ways in which the tensions between these influencing factors, as well as between their varying priority levels in divergent schools of architectural thought, have influenced the movement of architectural trends from prehistory the present day. Additionally, the authors include a significant amount of material on the mechanics and mathematics of architecture to go along with the aesthetic and theoretical discussions, which makes for a pleasingly balanced approach to a form which itself has to balance so many concerns.
Most impressively, the text is able to do all this without ever dumbing down the material or feeling chore-like. The book treats its reader as a smart individual curious on a topic with which he is less familiar, and rewards this curiosity by being a text which allows one to actually feel their knowledge growing, not simply due to the amount of visual and textual information being taken in but via the pleasure of finding oneself able to start recognizing patterns tying previously-imparted knowledge to the information at hand; the authors take every opportunity to allow the reader to make connections and inferences on his own whenever possible. One can sense the progress of his ability to think in an architectural mindset, and one of many reasons that this book will reward revisiting is that this ability to isolate and recognize patterns and details will wrap around from end to beginning and will continue to enhance and refine itself with further applications. Though one can at times risk the bleeding or blurring together of architects whose interests and goals diverged only slightly, the reading of such details in close proximity is actually more helpful than not, as it can allow one to recognize subtle differences or nuances that, given more time or space, might elude the reader altogether.
The book is designed to not only read well beginning to end as a linear narrative or architectural trends throughout history, but also to serve as an effective quick-hit guide to essential architects, movements, and buildings (though I suspect the book is one that will defy efforts to merely dip back in, as it exerts not only the pull of its own compelling nature but also that of the gravitational pull of historical forces; the material is presented in such a way that one will be tempted to peruse just a bit further forward and back to remember how one piece fits into a greater context, and then a bit further, and so on, fitting for an art form that seems Janus-faced in its propensity to always look forwards and backwards); there is an adaptive fluidity to the style of presentation so that the highlights of a particular building, for example, typically sub-elements of a page, can be expanded to a full two-page spread when called for. Throughout, the editors always ensure that one is properly situated and oriented temporally and geographically, so as never to be confused about the relationship of the material one has read to its greater context of history, time, and place.
Even the most prominent styles and architects are given four pages at most, giving the book a generosity and expansiveness that allows it to extend well beyond the best-known and most recognizable reference points of architectural history. (Even in its treatment of topics with which I was relatively more familiar, I was continually learning new information; in the four pages on Frank Lloyd Wright, the authors touched on the tragedy of his personal life as well as the unintended deleterious environmental effects of some of his techniques that paradoxically owed to his efforts to harmonize his buildings with their environments, and in the two pages on Art Deco in New York, they mentioned the numerous influences from around the world on that movement.) The authors took advantage of this extra space to highlight everyday buildings from antiquity to the 20th century that might not be mentioned elsewhere and to jam-pack the book’s layouts with all kinds of memorable tidbits (a few that stood out: the use of columned halls in Egyptian temples to separate the sacred from the profane, with light and space gradually reduced as one passed through until reaching the low-ceilinged and darkened sanctuary; the use in Crete of inverted cypress trunks in place of stone columns; and the use of elements in Greek friezes which were designed to mimic the ends of wooden beams).
The text is not quite presented as an entirely objective text, but allows elements of critical analysis to be introduced at times, which I found quite pleasing because it exposed me to certain strains of thought or analysis that would not have occurred to me otherwise; this effect never even approaches overbearingness, however, and on the whole, the book seems attuned to producing a reader who is adequately equipped to produce and render such judgements of his own. By detailing the seeking of ideals and perfection according to preferences, priorities, and theories that are ever undergoing continuous refinement, the authors provide the tools to analyze one's own taste and preferences, helping both to solidify one's preferences and to determine the factors influencing them. It clarifies and sharpens a particular lens through which one sees the elements of the world around them, able to read the flow of architectural “grammar” and “language,” and understand the motivations behind architectural choices; it makes one want to see more of the world, too, not just by exposing architectural specimens but by provoking thought about the cultures that produced them and appealing to one's empathic imagination of differing ways of life.
These effects are not accidental; the book always has in mind the reader’s further education, listing other important works of an architect or movement which weren’t discussed at length and leaving some terms and concepts unexplored at depth, thereby not only establishing itself as a foundational starting point but providing explicit suggestions for possibility of future exploration. The only significant drawbacks to Architecture: A World History are a number of spots that could have used some cleaned-up formatting or copy editing (special typographical characters and accents not rendered properly, hyphenations where there are no longer line breaks, missing spaces, spelling errors, missing bullets, a parenthetical reference to the page that the reference was on, and a couple cases resulting in the last line of a page being excluded), but they don’t reduce the overall effectiveness of this book as an introductory text.
Most impressively, the text is able to do all this without ever dumbing down the material or feeling chore-like. The book treats its reader as a smart individual curious on a topic with which he is less familiar, and rewards this curiosity by being a text which allows one to actually feel their knowledge growing, not simply due to the amount of visual and textual information being taken in but via the pleasure of finding oneself able to start recognizing patterns tying previously-imparted knowledge to the information at hand; the authors take every opportunity to allow the reader to make connections and inferences on his own whenever possible. One can sense the progress of his ability to think in an architectural mindset, and one of many reasons that this book will reward revisiting is that this ability to isolate and recognize patterns and details will wrap around from end to beginning and will continue to enhance and refine itself with further applications. Though one can at times risk the bleeding or blurring together of architects whose interests and goals diverged only slightly, the reading of such details in close proximity is actually more helpful than not, as it can allow one to recognize subtle differences or nuances that, given more time or space, might elude the reader altogether.
The book is designed to not only read well beginning to end as a linear narrative or architectural trends throughout history, but also to serve as an effective quick-hit guide to essential architects, movements, and buildings (though I suspect the book is one that will defy efforts to merely dip back in, as it exerts not only the pull of its own compelling nature but also that of the gravitational pull of historical forces; the material is presented in such a way that one will be tempted to peruse just a bit further forward and back to remember how one piece fits into a greater context, and then a bit further, and so on, fitting for an art form that seems Janus-faced in its propensity to always look forwards and backwards); there is an adaptive fluidity to the style of presentation so that the highlights of a particular building, for example, typically sub-elements of a page, can be expanded to a full two-page spread when called for. Throughout, the editors always ensure that one is properly situated and oriented temporally and geographically, so as never to be confused about the relationship of the material one has read to its greater context of history, time, and place.
Even the most prominent styles and architects are given four pages at most, giving the book a generosity and expansiveness that allows it to extend well beyond the best-known and most recognizable reference points of architectural history. (Even in its treatment of topics with which I was relatively more familiar, I was continually learning new information; in the four pages on Frank Lloyd Wright, the authors touched on the tragedy of his personal life as well as the unintended deleterious environmental effects of some of his techniques that paradoxically owed to his efforts to harmonize his buildings with their environments, and in the two pages on Art Deco in New York, they mentioned the numerous influences from around the world on that movement.) The authors took advantage of this extra space to highlight everyday buildings from antiquity to the 20th century that might not be mentioned elsewhere and to jam-pack the book’s layouts with all kinds of memorable tidbits (a few that stood out: the use of columned halls in Egyptian temples to separate the sacred from the profane, with light and space gradually reduced as one passed through until reaching the low-ceilinged and darkened sanctuary; the use in Crete of inverted cypress trunks in place of stone columns; and the use of elements in Greek friezes which were designed to mimic the ends of wooden beams).
The text is not quite presented as an entirely objective text, but allows elements of critical analysis to be introduced at times, which I found quite pleasing because it exposed me to certain strains of thought or analysis that would not have occurred to me otherwise; this effect never even approaches overbearingness, however, and on the whole, the book seems attuned to producing a reader who is adequately equipped to produce and render such judgements of his own. By detailing the seeking of ideals and perfection according to preferences, priorities, and theories that are ever undergoing continuous refinement, the authors provide the tools to analyze one's own taste and preferences, helping both to solidify one's preferences and to determine the factors influencing them. It clarifies and sharpens a particular lens through which one sees the elements of the world around them, able to read the flow of architectural “grammar” and “language,” and understand the motivations behind architectural choices; it makes one want to see more of the world, too, not just by exposing architectural specimens but by provoking thought about the cultures that produced them and appealing to one's empathic imagination of differing ways of life.
These effects are not accidental; the book always has in mind the reader’s further education, listing other important works of an architect or movement which weren’t discussed at length and leaving some terms and concepts unexplored at depth, thereby not only establishing itself as a foundational starting point but providing explicit suggestions for possibility of future exploration. The only significant drawbacks to Architecture: A World History are a number of spots that could have used some cleaned-up formatting or copy editing (special typographical characters and accents not rendered properly, hyphenations where there are no longer line breaks, missing spaces, spelling errors, missing bullets, a parenthetical reference to the page that the reference was on, and a couple cases resulting in the last line of a page being excluded), but they don’t reduce the overall effectiveness of this book as an introductory text.
January 27, 2010
I have long been interested in architecture and figured that the time was right to start learning more about it. A survey book with lots of pictures, I like it thus far. I finally learned what makes a buttress fly, but I'm still not convinced that a facade can be "amusing."
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September 8, 2011kendimi nasıl geliştirdim.....
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews