Product Description

For the first time, a student can now find all the key plans in one place. Featuring more than 100 of the most significant and influential buildings of the twentieth century, this book includes both classic works by such seminal architects as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto, as well as those by more recent masters, such as Norman Foster. Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas. For each of the buildings included there are numerous, accurate scale plans showing each floor, together with elevations, sections and site plans where appropriate. All of these have been specially commissioned for the book and are based on the most up-to-date information and sources. There is also a concise text explaining the significant architectural features of the building and the influences it shows or generated, together with full-colour images. Cross-references to other buildings in the book highlight the various connections between these key structures.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78126 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
Once opened it is difficult to put down. --Journal of Architectural Conservation

About the Author
An architect, landscape designer and author, Richard Weston is a Professor at the Weish School of Architecture, Cardiff University. Previous books include the monograph Alvar Aalto (winner of the 1995 Sir Banister Fletcher Prize) and the definitive monograph on the Danish architect Jorn Utzon, while The House in the Twentieth Century (2001) and Materials, Form and Architecture (2003) are both published by Laurence King.

Customer Reviews

Great book, for brief research
I really like this book, its been usefull just to use quickly to learn a little about any one of the featured buildings. Photos, plans, elevations and sections all help to give an understanding to the spacial layout of the buildings.
However the Cd that comes with it is not great, the images are not well named or organised and parts of the images are cut off.

Good for discovering buildings you did'nt know about
This book is great for discovering great buildings you might not have know existed. My main gripe with this book is the drawings on the CD. I create 3D Visuals of Architecture and I purchased this book so I can create new peices of personal work for my portfolio using the CAD on the CD. The CAD is very frustrating. Non of the drawings match up properly, Louis Kahn's Salk Institute is all over the place, sections don't match elevations. None of the drawings seem to be consistent in scale and is very difficult to determin the measure of things. The drawings are as basic as they get. Dont expect any great detail. Also, the folders they are in are not named, just numbered, not by page number I might add!, so you have to go to the building in the book that interests you, match the title to the non numbered index at the back of the book, find the name in the long list and then it tells you which folder it's in. Crazy! I may sound picky but at the end of the day this is a book about Architecture containing Architectural drawings, it needs to be right.

The book is a good effort. Richard Weston should have shortened the list a little and provided better drawings and provided a better indexing system. I think the CD was an afterthought because the book was lacking before going to print.

Too many buildings, too few photos.
Although this is one of the few books to have detailed plans and elevations of 20th buildings, the quantity of buildings in the book reduces the quality of the experience. In addition, a number of what I consider key buildings are not there! But the choice must have been tricky.

It would be far better to have fewer buildings and to spread the detail of each one on to four pages. Instead, each is dealt with in a double-spread, one page having one or two small photographs accompanied by writing, the other having the plans and elevations.

The photos don't always give a good impression of what the building really looks like and they provide scant reference to accompany the plans. The plans vary in detail with the size of the building and are fascinating, but this is very much a reference book and not one for a good flick through! The CD is not really worth having unless you have CAD software to run it on. The images are in two formats, one of which opens in any pdf reader, but they aren't always complete and don't print well. It would be easier and more successful to photocopy the pages, but this isn't permitted.

In many ways it is a good book, but the lack of photographs lets it down very badly. I was disappointed.