The Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documentary History, from 1000 to 1810


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A cognitive history of the emergence of modern architecture. Cutting across disciplinarian and institutional divisions as we know them today, �this book reconstructs developments within the framework of a cognitive history of the past. Modern is here taken to mean the radical re-thinking of architecture from the end of the tenth century in Europe to the end of the eighteenth century. Among the key debates that mark the period are those that oppose tradition to innovation, canon to discovery, geometrical formality to natural picturesqueness, the functional to the hedonistic.The Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documentary History, from 1000 to 1810 Review
Although I am an architect and profess the mysteries of my profession, I seldom review architecture books only because most are tedious and pretentious -- same thing, really. But here I will make an exception since this book IS an exception.There can be no better review of this wonderful book than the Table of Contents itself: go check it out yourself: you'll see an amazing array of authors culled from the last 810 years spouting off their opinions about what they think makes for Architecture as an art. And that's what makes this book so terrific. After all, what a thing like 'Architecture' is, is defined not by its "essence" or "substance" but by how it is perceived to be; and by how people struggled, in its name, to make something worth looking at and talking about.
The author's 25+ pages of introduction is the best overview of the history of (Western) Architecture I've ever read. History in the best sense of the word: by registering all the major problems that affected, determined, and altered Architecture INTO its modernity. It is a feat in itself that he could pull something like that off.
Every original document is introduced by the authors in a paragrapgh or two, and then is allowed to speak as it once spoke when it was first published. Some of the problems that once thrilled and annoyed the best architectural minds may now come off seeming either quaint, incomprehensible, or even mysterious. But no matter how distant some of these problems may appear today, you can see for yourself two things: One, architects of the past entertained bigger ideas than architects do today; Two, that architects of the past did not suffer from the kind of disease of the soul that seems to be par for the course in posturing as an "avant-garde."
Highly recommended for all students of Architecture who, for want of maturity of architectural understanding, like to insist that the Bilbao Guggenheim, or the Berlin Jewish Museum is on par with say, the Duomo in Milano.
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