Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change

Rating:
Summary: Cerebral guide to architecture
Review: This book is a wonderful introduction to architectural criticism, more lively than Colin Rowe's "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays" and Reyner Banham's "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age." Colquhoun applies all sorts of funky terminology borrowed from and in some cases anticipating literary theory (e.g., a term like "bricolage," which is bandied about by Homi Bhabha, is used in this book, published in the mid 80s, to describe Michael Graves's work). While Colquhoun's arguments are not always so easy to understand in general, whenever he discusses specific buildings, it's clear to see what he's driving at. The book investigates some of the classics of modern architecture, but also discusses buildings that aren't well described in the standard books, e.g. the Centraal Beheer building in Alpendoorn, Netherlands. Also, Colquhoun is a committed modernist; all the buildings covered here are descended from the modern movement. There is very little speculation or "what-ifness" here (one of the irritating aspects, to me, of postmodernist Robert Venturi's "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture"), just close, theoretically informed analysis (using a Continental theoretical vocabulary and dispensing, as the Introduction states, of Banham's "positivism") of the buildings in question. Along with Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" (much more delightful than "Machine Age"), Colquhoun's "Essays" is my favorite book of architectural criticism.