How Architecture Works

Starred review from June 10, 2013
Prize-winning architectural writer and University of Pennsylvania emeritus professor Rybczynski (A Clearing in the Distance) follows in the spirit of Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s classic Experiencing Architecture to supply an ideal layperson’s handbook on the fundamentals of modern and contemporary architecture. Focusing on the functional and aesthetic considerations that define a building, and often calling upon his experience as an architect to illustrate major concepts, Rybczynski vividly explains particulars such as how to read architectural plans and how sunlight figures into designs, as well as discussing issues of style, history, and taste. While the book tends to address structure after structure at a speedy clip, the upshot is a commanding view of the field for beginners. An especially rich example is the walk-through of several designs submitted to the competition for the National Museum of African-American History and Culture: this not only illustrates how different architects respond to constraints, but also how such competitions function. Rybczynski is not a polemicist, but he effectively argues certain basic principles, and makes a cogent analogy to typography to show how the past always influences the present. Here, architecture is treated as craft executed with prudence and conviction. The author doesn’t care much for theories, or buildings that fail to be practical, but welcomes “a variety of design approaches,” all of which make him a model teacher. 140 b&w illus.

Starred review from August 1, 2013
The erudite and architecturally well-traveled Rybczynski (Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities, 2010, etc.) offers a brimming toolkit that we should bring to "our daily experience of buildings, which is practical as well as aesthetic." In this robust tour of architecture--in which he offers plenty of opinions, without being overly opinionated, and a host of useful, disarming illuminations--the author delivers a conceptual framework for approaching architecture, in addition to presenting the many different intentions and theories of architects. It is also written for the man and woman on the street, the story of these settings of everyday life, allowing readers into architects' heads. Rybczynski writes with equal felicity on architecture as art--why a building touches us and speaks to us--as well as its function and realization. He moves with ease, accompanied by copious examples and illustrations, among significant moments in the architect's work: the importance of the specificity of site; symmetries and axes, movement, orientation and disorientation; how the setting can be both embraced and set in opposition; working with a street grid, a brassy or refined environment; fashioning a small house in a cramped lot. In architecture, writes the author, the materials are the message, as in the skin of a building: tight, soft, heavy, light, ornamental, flat or backlit. There are all the details and quirks that can make or break our immediate response to a building--a Rem Koolhaas studio railing is a lovely example--and there are all the creations, borrowings, manipulation and nurturings of style, not to mention the furtive notions of taste, suitability and proportion. Rybczynski is an artful conductor and learned hand who leaves much of the pleasure of architectural discovery to readers.

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Starred review from October 1, 2013
Architecture, if it is any good, speaks to us all. With this maxim, the first of many clarifying observations in this conversational and invigorating treatise, Rybczynski deepens our understanding of all that goes into the design and construction of buildings. An architect, emeritus professor, and outstanding and prolific architectural writer, Rybczynski takes palpable pleasure in throwing open the doors to reveal the complex, often contradictory demands of architecture, illuminating the practical as well as the aesthetic. His toolkit contains 10 fundamental topics, from ideas to structural matters, the difference between a building's setting and site, and the importance of such seemingly prosaic details as balustrades. As he instructs us in the implications of the fact that new buildings almost always have old neighbors, for example, he describes how Frank Gehry dealt with this challenge in funky Venice Beach, and the diverse approaches taken by top architects competing to build the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and a new ballet-opera house in St. Petersburg. With fluent analysis of buildings by architects ranging from Louis Sullivan to Louis I. Kahn, Mies van der Rohe to Renzo Piano, a sweet absence of isms, and an invaluable glossary, Rybczynski's expert, holistic, down-to-earth guide awakens us to architecture's profound humanness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)