Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834) regarded the Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (1802–5) and its companion volume, the Graphic Portion (1821), as both a basic course for future civil engineers and a treatise. Focusing the practice of architecture on utilitarian and economic values, he assailed the rationale behind classical architectural training: beauty, proportionality, and symbolism. His formal systematization of plans, elevations, and sections transformed architectural design into a selective modular typology in which symmetry and simple geometrical forms prevailed. His emphasis on pragmatic values, to the exclusion of metaphysical concerns, represented architecture as a closed system that subjected its own formal language to logical processes. Now published in English for the first time, the Précis and the Graphic Portion are classics of architectural education.

Bewerkte compilatie van de stof behandeld in de colleges van de architect aan de Technische Universiteit Delft.

The observer-designer-theorists who analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in "Learning from Las Vegas" now turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has spawned for this fascinating retrospective of their life work.

Modern Architecture is a landmark text--the first book in which America's greatest architect put forth the principles of a fundamentally new, organic architecture that would reject the trappings of historical styles while avoiding the geometric abstraction of the machine aesthetic advocated by contemporary European modernists. One of the most important documents in the development of modern architecture and the career of Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern Architecture is a provocative and profound polemic against America's architectural eclecticism, commercial skyscrapers, and misguided urban planning. The book is also a work of savvy self-promotion, in which Wright not only advanced his own concept of an organic architecture but also framed it as having anticipated by decades--and bettered--what he saw as the reductive modernism of his European counterparts. Based on the 1931 original, for which Wright supplied the cover illustration, this beautiful edition includes a new introduction that puts Modern Architecture in its broader architectural, historical, and intellectual context for the first time. The subjects of these lively lectures--from "Machinery, Materials and Men" to "The Tyranny of the Skyscraper" and "The City"--move from a general statement of the conditions of modern culture to particular applications in the fields of architecture and urbanism at ever broadening scales. Wright's vision in Modern Architecture is ultimately to equate the truly modern with romanticism, imagination, beauty, and nature--all of which he connects with an underlying sense of American democratic freedom and individualism.

Meyer Schapiro (1904-96), renowned for his critical essays on 19th and 20th century painting, also played a decisive role as a young scholar in defining the style of art and architecture known as Romanesque. This is a transcribed and edited version of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures.