History of buildings, groups of buildings, the styles in which they were built, and the architects responsible for them from Stonehenge to the present.

This dissertation examines the evolution of Western and Modern architecture in Siam and Thailand. It illustrates how various architectural ideas have contributed to the physical design and spatial configuration of places associated with negotiation and allocation of political power, which are throne halls, parliaments, and government and civic structures since the 1850s.

Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.

A groundbreaking history of architecture told through the relationship between buildings and energy The story of architecture is the story of humanity. The buildings we live in, from the humblest pre-historic huts to today's skyscrapers, reveal our priorities and ambitions, our family structures and power structures. And to an extent that hasn't been explored until now, architecture has been shaped in every era by our access to energy, from fire to farming to fossil fuels. In this ground-breaking history of world architecture, Barnabas Calder takes us on a dazzling tour of some of the most astonishing buildings of the past fifteen thousand years, from Uruk, via Ancient Rome and Victorian Liverpool, to China's booming megacities. He reveals how every building - from the Parthenon to the Great Mosque of Damascus to a typical Georgian house - was influenced by the energy available to its architects, and why this matters. Today architecture consumes so much energy that 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from the construction and running of buildings. If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change then now, more than ever, we need beautiful but also intelligent buildings, and to retrofit - not demolish - those that remain. Both a celebration of human ingenuity and a passionate call for greater sustainability, this is a history of architecture for our times.

A guide to the prominent architectural movements of the last 25 years.

First published in 2004. Walter Benjamin famously defined modernity as “the world dominated by its phantasmagorias”. The chapters in this book focus on one such phantasmagoria, namely that of ‘modernity’ itself. From the late seventeenth century until today, the ‘modern’ has served as a key category by which to understand an ever-changing present. Art and architecture have played a key role in this pursuit as the means by which the modern was to manifest itself. The aim of this anthology is to trace the modern project through its multifarious manifestations, in order to understand contemporary culture in a deeper sense than facile discussions of modernism and post-modernism often grant. Drawing on architectural and urban history as well as philosophy and sociology, the chapters outline the complex and conflicting roots of modernity by tracing its manifestations in architecture and the city. The book is divided into three parts, each exploring a distinct aspect of modernity. While part one scrutinizes the much-abused concepts of ‘modernity’ , ‘modernism’ and ‘the modern’ , parts two and three look at the manifestations of the modern in architecture and the city respectively. Focusing particularly on the transition between historicism and modernism, the chapters offer a re-interpretation of early modern architectural and urban culture as it came to expression in people such as Cerda, Semper, Bötticher, Scott, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Benjamin, Warburg, Kracauer, Mackintosh, Behrens, Taut, and Le Corbusier. For all their differences, these were thinkers and practitioners whose undisputed modernity arose from a deep preoccupation with history. A re-reading of their legacy may throw light on the neglected reciprocity between modernity and its historical conditions of becoming.

On the study of prearchitecture that took place after WWII. Can there ever be a world before architecture? Is there an arche--origin, beginning, or authority--that precedes the appearance of architectonics? This book argues that such a pre-architectural state became a central object of investigation by architectural historians and practicing architects in the aftermath of world historical events and major epistemological revolutions. Confronted by the ravages of war and omens of modern architecture's own ending, architects like Frederick Kiesler tried to trace the origins of human design by exploring the foundational techniques of human and animal building through conversation with paleoanthropologists and evolutionary biologists of the first half of the twentieth-century. At the same time, historians like Sigfried Giedion attempted to reinterpret a number of recently discovered prehistoric monuments, if only to corroborate theoretical principles that were already in use by modernist art and architectural critics. After WWII, the narrative of Prearchitecture moves progressively backwards to the middle of the nineteenth century when the term "prearchitectonic" was coined even before the institutional emergence of prehistory as a discipline of scientific research. Gottfried Semper wrote about the "prearchitectonic conditions" of peoples from eras preceding the historical civilizations of the Near East, expressed through smaller structures such as ceramics but not yet through monumental structures. For Semper, "prearchitectonic" elements described not a single temporal period but a general structural condition that survived the inventions of history and of architecture. Ultimately, the study of prehistoric origins could uncover not only the causes of modernity's present crisis, but also the signs of architecture's futures past. By juxtaposing the fossils of prehistory with postwar cosmic anxieties and prognostications of a post-histoire, what is ultimately invented is a pre/post/erous history--a fictional prehistory of future architectonics. Pre-architecture is not simply "not architecture;" it is what architecture could have become but ultimately disavowed. The same unfulfilled potentialities haunt not only the distant past but also architecture's anxious present that periodically circles back to an aborted prehistory.