This attractive and well‐presented book offers a detailed look at different architectural styles, building types and construction elements. It is a directory of visual images of buildings and parts of buildings, drawing attention to, and naming, their elements (the “lexicon”). The book consists almost entirely of illustrations, some 512 high‐quality coloured photographs and line drawings. They are arranged in three broad chapters: building types (temples, cathedrals, churches, castles, country houses, public buildings, “street‐facing buildings”, modern block and high‐rise buildings); Structures (columns and piers, arches, and modern structures such as concrete, steel and glass buildings) and Architectural Elements (walls and surfaces, windows and doors, roofs, stairs and lifts). Thus one can use the book as a sort of up‐market I‐Spy or Observer's Book to buildings – one looks at a church, civic building or office block, notices a feature, finds it illustrated in this book, and identifies the brick work as, say, English or Flemish bond, the roof as hipped gable or mansard, the column type as Greek Doric or Corinthian, and the type of concrete or render as gypsum plaster, stucco or pebble‐dash. In the case of columns, parts are identified, such as the cornice, and within the cornice, the cyma recta, corona, modillion, ovolo and dentil. Not that one could easily walk down a street or round a stately home with the book, for at 270 mm by 210 mm it is best consulted at a library table or office desk.
The book can also be used in the reverse mode: You want to know what a Scotia moulding looks like? Then using the index, turn to the line drawing on page 107, and then the illustrations on pages 65, 67, 68 and 69 where you will find the moulding featured in situ. The Glossary can also help: “Scotia: The concave moulding at the base of classical columns, between the two tori”. Illustrations can be full‐page photographs or line drawings of complete buildings or large features – an actual gothic town hall (the Stadhuis in Delft) or a drawing of a Corinthian column perhaps. A particularly successful feature in the full‐page illustrations is the use of indicators – straight red lines – connecting the feature in the picture to its name and brief prose description located on the borders of the picture. These also give a reference to the pages where more detailed accounts of the feature will be found. Thus to the photograph of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in Poissy, lines lead you to identify the ribbon window, flat roof, curvilinear concrete superstructure, mullion, cement‐rendered wall, piloti, and the ground floor storage and service area. On the page opposite to this modern building we have the eighteenth century Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, with fifteen features indicated, including a blind central arch, Attic panel relief, mezzanine window, voussoirs, and rustication. The note to Rustication gives “a style of working masonry in which the joints between adjacent blocks of stone are accentuated. See also [chapter on] Walls and Surfaces”. There are also smaller photographs (coloured) to specific features such as ceramic curtain‐wall panel, quoins, campaniform capital and flying buttress. The page on staircases has eight types illustrated including newel, cantilevered and open.
Each of the three chapters has a brief introduction and entries are heavily cross‐referenced. There is a particularly full and useful glossary and a full index, though I struggled a little with inverted terms (buttresses, flying) and the prolific indentations. It was a while before I found campaniform buried in no fewer than 74 sub headings of decorative elements, while several topics have sub‐sub‐headings, e.g. doors – elements – sidelights and doors – forms – sliding. There are times when such an alphabetico‐classed approach is over‐sophisticated for a simple finding list. The distinction between “forms” and “elements”, just noted, and between “structures” and “elements” in the chapter divisions, are also, to my mind, a touch over‐sophisticated, although I recognize the difficulty of how to arrange a “visual” dictionary. At this point we should note that this is a book compiled by a professional architect with a professional architect's mind‐set. Author Owen Hopkins works for the Architecture Programme at the Royal Academy of Art in London, and in his introduction he takes issue with Pevsner's approach to architecture and insists that a building with “architectural” merit is one that has “meaning”, a meaning often based on the character of the commissioning owner; hence “reading” the building as in “reading” a painting. No suburban semis or multi‐story car parks here! In the words of the author, “This book is intended to act as a visual guide to the various ways in which a building can be articulated; from wall renderings and roof structure, to column types and decorative mouldings”. Having said that, however, the book is free of jargon and the illustrations are left to speak for themselves. There is plenty here to interest practising builders and the construction industry, such as the different types of bricks, roof cladding, soffits, string‐courses, stair nosings, and types of lift.
The illustrations are models of clarity and the buildings featured come from around the world. They include the Chhatropatri Shivaji Rail Terminus in Mumbai, which must have every Gothic feature imaginable; the ultra‐tall Lichtenstein Castle; the iconic modern steel structure of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; the gherkin‐like Torre Agbar in Barcelona (an example of a curvilinear high‐rise building); the Art Deco Chrysler Building in New York; and the modern National Opera & Ballet building in Oslo with its glass curtain wall and aluminium cladding.
I find this a most useful book: essential for libraries serving architects, the construction trades and students of the built environment, and recommended for general libraries. Owen Hopkins has produced a pioneering and inspirational work.
