The Look at Architecture.(Book review)

Publication: Sarmatian Review

Publication Date: 01-JAN-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 Polish Institute of Houston, Inc.

The Look at Architecture

By Witold Rybczynski. New York: Oxford University Press/The New York Public Library, 2001. 130 pages. Illustrations, index. ISBN 019-513443-5. Hardcover. $25.00 on Amazon.com.

"Commoditie," "Firmeness," and "Delight"--with these three terms, borrowed from the seventeenth-century English architect Sir Henry Wotton, Witold Rybczynski sets up the shorthand for this remarkable tour of the achievements and follies of (mainly) modern architecture. Rybczynski, professor of urban studies and real estate at the University of Pennsylvania and one of America's foremost architectural critics, navigates between these three ideas (which could be rephrased as utilitarian value, structural soundness, and aesthetic integrity) with an intimate, almost elemental ease. Little wonder: his previous studies have journeyed over a vast terrain of subjects architectural, from the domestic Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986) through the utilitarian One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw (2000) to the theoretically polemical City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World...

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