Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Sir Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture, is an encyclopaedic volume that includes plans, line drawings and photographs of buildings of all ages and in all places. It is a very useful reference book and has been revised and reprinted many times since its first appearance in 1896. Earlier editions confined their scope to the Western tradition. It has changed under the influence of its various editors, and different editions have claimed the loyalty of different readers. The most recent edition, the twentieth, has 1840 pages and is called Sir Banister Fletcher’s ‘A History of Architecture’, edited by Dan Cruickshank, Andrew Saint, Kenneth Frampton and Peter Blundell-Jones (Architectural Press, 1996).

Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (Oxford University Press, second edition 1995). This illustrates fewer buildings, but across an equally wide range. The text offers more interpretation, and situates the buildings in their various cultures. It is widely admired and used in university courses.

David Watkin, A History of Western Architecture (Laurence King, third edition 2000) confines its scope to the Western tradition, stressing the continuity of that tradition in twentieth-century architecture. By excluding alternative viewpoints and perspectives, he simplifies matters and, partly as a consequence, the text is highly readable.

The idea of ‘home’ is the subject of a book by Witold Rybczynski: Home: a Short History of an Idea (Viking, 1986). It gives an impression of how our ways of occupying houses have changed over the centuries.

Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own: the Education of an Amateur Builder (Random House, 1997) describes the commissioning and construction of a small building in the author’s garden, and shows how personal and emotional investments are made along with the effort and ingenuity involved in building.

The range of forces at work on buildings is explored in Edward Allen, How Buildings Work (Oxford University Press, second edition 1995). The books shows how many things find resolution in a building’s design, and is complemented by Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (Viking, 1994) which shows how people adapt buildings to overcome problems that the designers did not anticipate.

There is a host of more specialized studies that caters to particular interests, and the bibliographies and recommendations in the books listed above will point towards them. A few historic texts can be recommended for the insight that they give into the architecture of different eras. The older they are, the more certain one can be that an untutored intuitive reaction to the text will be a misinterpretation. Nevertheless there is no substitute for reading them, to give an impression of the ideas that motivated architects in other ages. Ancient: Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, translated by Morris Hickey Morgan (Harvard University Press, 1914 — reprinted and available in paperback) or by Ingrid Rowland (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Medieval: Suger’s account of the works at Saint-Denis (available in translation edited by Erwin Panofsky, Princeton University Press, second edition 1979). Renaissance: Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor and Neil Leach (MIT Press, 1988). Neoclassical: Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, translated by Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (Hennessy and Ingalls, 1977). Modernism: Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, translated by John Rodker (Architectural Press, 1927 many reprints).