Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change

by Alan Colquboun and Alan Colquhoun

Book Overview

Preface by Kenneth Frampton Winner of the 1985 Architectural Critics Award for the best book published on architectural criticism over the past three years. Since the early 1950s, Alan Colquhoun's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262530635
• ISBN13: 9780262530637
• Release Date: August 1985
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.5" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

Cerebral guide to architecture

This book is a wonderful introduction to architectural criticism, more lively than Colin Rowe's "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays" and Reyner Banham's "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age." Colquhoun applies all sorts of funky terminology borrowed from and in some cases anticipating literary theory (e.g., a term like "bricolage," which is bandied about by Homi Bhabha, is used in this book, published in the mid 80s, to describe Michael Graves's work). While Colquhoun's arguments are not always so easy to understand in general, whenever he discusses specific buildings, it's clear to see what he's driving at. The book investigates some of the classics of modern architecture, but also discusses buildings that aren't well described in the standard books, e.g. the Centraal Beheer building in Alpendoorn, Netherlands. Also, Colquhoun is a committed modernist; all the buildings covered here are descended from the modern movement. There is very little speculation or "what-ifness" here (one of the irritating aspects, to me, of postmodernist Robert Venturi's "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture"), just close, theoretically informed analysis (using a Continental theoretical vocabulary and dispensing, as the Introduction states, of Banham's "positivism") of the buildings in question. Along with Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" (much more delightful than "Machine Age"), Colquhoun's "Essays" is my favorite book of architectural criticism.