Principles of Architectural History: The Four Phases of Architectural Style, 1420 - 1900

"Paul Frankl was, as Professor James S. Ackerman notes in his short but excellent introduction to this volume, one of the last survivors of the golden age of German art history. This book makes available in translation one of the most important of his works, a volume first published in 1914 and hitherto rather inaccessible to American scholars. A major reason for this inaccessibility—Frankl's difficult and often private language—has been eliminated by the superb translation of Professor James F. O'Gorman, who has also supplied a helpful set of notes. The book will be a welcome addition to any architectural library."
—Leonard K. Eaton, Isis

"Two generations of architectural historians have been decisively influenced by Frankl's concepts, accentuating the feeling for the sequence and combination of spaces, and for the intrinsic tension between volume and void.... Frankl's identification of the architectural image with the mental image is, of course, influenced by the main tenets of the then developing Gestalt psychology."
—Paul Zucker, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

"The translation is relaxed and readable. The illustrative material has been augmented. Let us now hope for a paperback edition, so that we can assign the book with an easier conscience to our students. And let us hope the MIT Press continues to give us other such central books, in translations of this caliber."
—Spiro Kostof, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians