Classical Architecture: Language, Variety and Adaptability

Celebration of the classical architectural tradition, spanning 2500 years but widely practised today. Professionals, students and enthusiasts will benefit from the profuse illustrations, including detailed line drawings, demonstrating this rich tradition and its prevailing themes and motifs.


Classical architecture continues to be widely practised today, and this book describes and demonstrates the fundamental principles from its origins in Antiquity and continuous development during the Renaissance, the Baroque and Rococo phases, Neo-Classicism, and survival in various forms into the current century. Heavily illustrated with colour and black and white photography, a particular strength of the book is the many detailed and annotated line drawings for which the author is well-known and a glossary which serves as a dictionary of Classical architecture in itself.
The author celebrates the richness of Classical architectural vocabulary, grammar and language, and demonstrates the huge range of themes and motifs found in the subject. The book provides a basis for understanding this rich source of architectural design which has been at the core of Western culture for over 2500 years and continues to be widely studied and practised worldwide. For practicing architects, planners and students, this is the benchmark book for understanding the Classical tradition in architecture and landscape.

Professor JAMES STEVENS CURL has an international reputation as an architectural historian whose publications span Classical, Georgian and Victorian architecture, and with Susan Wilson he wrote the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture, published by Oxford University Press in 2016. His Making Dystopia; The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (OUP, 2018) is a combative critique of the Modernist movement and, while controversial, asks questions about our urban landscapes to which answers are long overdue.