Essays in architectural criticism: Modern architecture and historical change (Oppositions books)

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 criticism and theory have acted as a conscience to a generation of architects. His rigor and conceptual clarity have consistently stimulated debate and have served as an impetus for the pursuit of new directions in both theory and practice. This collection of 17 of his essays marks a watershed in the development of architectural thinking over the past three decades, comprising a virtual "theory of Modernism" in architecture. In his earliest essays, Colquhoun concentrated on themes that for him comprised the modernist attitude in architecture - language, typology, and the structure of form. His stance since then has consistently been to try to relate these issues to current practice and to analyze the nature of architectural expression in relation to culture. Alan Colquhoun divides his time between England, where is is a principal in the firm of Colquhoun & Miller, and the United States, where he is Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. An Oppositions Book.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262030764
• ISBN13: 9780262030762
• Release Date: March 1981
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 215 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.

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.