Looking Around: A Journey Through Architecture

Using examples from the giants in architecture, a history of the art demonstrates how architecture actually works in corporate headquarters, private homes, and special buildings to represent our civilization. 35,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo.

With catholic taste, McGill University professor of architecture Rybczynski admires Michael Graves's post-modernist Portland Building in Oregon, Swedish artist Carl Larsson's modified log cabin and the New York Public Library, "built for the ages." Readers of his books Home and The Most Beautiful House in the World will enjoy this collection of previously published articles and essays. Rybczynski touts the advantages of smaller houses and links the revival of traditional house forms to a longing for the bourgeois ideals of stability and domesticity. With his usual grace, wit and lucidity, he writes about the quest for a regional California architectural style, about high tech as a "mass-market fashion," about airports, about Palladio's 15th century Italian villas and about art museum design and suburban sprawl. In one essay he interprets the decade 1910-1919 as a period of disorientation that ushered in modernism. As for the 1990s, Rybczynski sees no end to the profession's self-indulgence, as architects shirk their responsibilities to community and society.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rybczynski is an architectural critic whose interests and resulting essays roam far from the specific building(s) he is enjoying. These critiques employ a gentle, even relaxed prose that allows readers to share Rybczynski's aesthetic connections and his expansions on the role of building styles in our constructed world. The book contains 35 brief pieces divided into three sections: "Homes and Houses," "Special Places," and "The Art of Building." Rybczynski takes us from the demise of the parlour (is the living room next?), to the Nixon Library, to the future of Chicago architecture. By wandering confidently through a broad anthropological as well as architectural landscape, the author is able to unite a wide range of design details into insightful analysis. This work is recommended for both academic and public libraries.
- David Bryant, Belleville P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.