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Jeff Bianco
Joined: 14 Apr 2004
Posts: 16
Location: Connecticut
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 Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 10:00 am Post subject: best intro to architecture book |
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EXPERIENCING ARCHITECTURE
S E Rasmussen
MIT Press |
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Kevin
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2004
Posts: 1138
Location: Eugene, Oregon
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| Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 7:23 pm Post subject: |
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Agreed. The best overall introduction to thinking, feeling, and understanding, as well as seeing, architecture.
Experiencing Architecture, by Steen Eiler Rasmussen
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262680025?tag=artificeinc&link_code=as3&creativeASIN= 0262680025
From Amazon.com....
Product Description
Profusely illustrated with fine instances of architectural experimentation through the centuries, Experiencing Architecture manages to convey the intellectual excitement of superb design. From teacups, riding boots, golf balls, and underwater sculpture to the villas of Palladio and the fish-feeding pavilion of the Peking Winter Palace, the author ranges over the less-familiar byways of designing excellence.
At one time, writes Rasmussen, "the entire community tool part in forming the dwellings and implements they used. The individual was in fruitful contact with these things; the anonymous houses were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use and the result was a remarkably suitable comeliness. Today, in our highly civilized society, the houses which ordinary people are doomed to live in and gaze upon are on the whole without quality. We cannot, however, go back to the old method of personally supervised handicrafts. We must strive to advance by arousing interest in and understanding of the work the architect does. The basis of competent professionalism is a sympathetic and knowledgeable group of amateurs, of non-professional art lovers." |
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solidred
Joined: 05 Jan 2006
Posts: 621
Location: Scotland
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| Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 5:19 am Post subject: |
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If you fancy an in-depth study of who architects are, who they consider themselves to be and how their role, actual and perceived has changed over time, you might like to try:
http://www.amazon.com/Image-Architect-Andrew-Saint/dp/0300030134
The Image of the Architect, by Andrew Saint
The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton's pretty lucid too
My own first book on architecture, though, was a borrowed library copy of The Architecture of the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts edited by Arthur Drexler. I didn't read it, I simply gawped in wonder at the beautiful drawings in it and used them as inspiration behind my own doodles. |
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