Architecture - Andrew Ballantyne [60]
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).
Index
A
Adam, brothers (Robert, John and James) 11
Alberti, Leon Battista 10, 98
Acropolis 55 (see also Parthenon, Erechtheion)
Anglo-Saxon 84, 85
Architecture
possible histories 3–4, 14
as a cultural aspect of buildings 21–22, 115–16
as impressive buildings 29, 31
as gesture 20–21, 25, 34, 49, 50, 95, 107
and high culture 15, 39, 51, 65, 77, 87, 91, 95, 104
and persuasion 45, 47, 48
and fashion 74, 76, 91
Art Nouveau 94, 96, 98
Arup, Ove 88
Athena 40, 55, 56, 108
Autun 78
B
Barcelona 37, 98 (see also Sagrada Familia)
Baroque 10, 60–1, 64, 67, 72–4, 98, 121 (see also Wieskirche)
Barry, Sir Charles 35
Bartok, Bela 112
Bauhaus 86, 90
Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo 10
Bilbao 13, 97, 104–5, 115 (see also Guggenheim)
Blaise Hamlet, Bristol 27
Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna 50
Bocabella, Josep 99
Borromini, Francesco 10
Bourges Cathedral 41–2, 57, 58–9, 114
Brighton, Royal Pavilion 27–8, 31, 50, 62, 67, 103, 111
British Museum 82
Broken pediment 121
Brunelleschi, Filippo 7–8, 68, 78, 98
Budapest 33
Buildings
as shelter 2
as archaeological evidence 2–3, 15, 32
as solid things 115
Burgundy 41, 78
Burlington House 73–4
Burlington, Lord 73–5, 77
Burlington, Lady 73, 75
Byzantine 7, 69 (see also Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, New Rome)
C
Callicrates (or Kallikrates) 40, 101
Campbell, Colen 73–4, 76–7
Canon 21, 65, 114–15
Cella 121
Chainsaw 106
Chandigarh 36–7, 103
Charles I 72
Chartres 56, 57, 58, 59
Chastellux, Marquis de 67, 73
Chicago 6, 90–2, 97–8, 107
Chiswick Villa 73, 74, 75, 76
CIAM 11, 121
Classical civilization 6, 9, 39, 121 (see also Greece