Analysing Architecture

Analysing Architecture
Simon Unwin
Routledge, January 2014 (fourth edition)



Paperback | Page Size inches | 336 pages | 816 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0415719162 | $75.95

Publisher's Description:

Now in its fourth edition, Analysing Architecture has become internationally established as the best introduction to architecture. Aimed primarily at those wishing to become professional architects, it also offers those in disciplines related to architecture (from archaeology to stage design, garden design to installation art), a clear and accessible insight into the workings of this rich and fascinating subject. With copious illustrations from his own notebooks, the author dissects examples from around the world and all periods of history to explain underlying strategies in architectural design and show how drawing may be used as a medium for analysis.

This new edition of Analysing Architecture is revised and expanded. Notably, the chapter on ‘Basic Elements of Architecture’ has been enlarged to discuss the ‘powers’ various architectural elements offer the architect. Three new chapters have been added to the section on ‘Themes in Spatial Organisation’, covering ‘Occupying the In-between’, ‘Inhabited Wall’ and ‘Refuge and Prospect’. Two new examples – a Mud House from Kerala, India and the Mongyo-tei (a tea house) from Kyoto, Japan – have been added to the ‘Case Studies’ at the end of the book. The ‘Select Bibliography’ has been expanded and the ‘Index’ revised.

Works of architecture are instruments for managing, orchestrating, modifying our relationship with the world around us. They frame just about everything we do. Architecture is complex, subtle, frustrating… but ultimately extremely rewarding. It can be a difficult discipline to get to grips with; nothing in school quite prepares anyone for the particular demands of an architecture course. But this book will help.

dDAB Commentary:

When I began architecture school nearly thirty years ago, one of the books I had to purchase and have on my desk for the first day of studio was Francis Ching's Architecture: Form, Space, & Order. No doubt, my school was not alone in using that classic text or other books by Ching that clearly explain fundamentals of architecture, drawing, construction, interiors, and so forth. But I'm guessing there are schools, in the UK for sure, that have used British architect Simon Unwin's Analysing Architecture instead of Form, Space, & Order for introducing students of architecture to the elements of architecture and ways of organizing space.

First published in 1997, two decades after the first edition of Ching's book (both had their fourth editions published in 2014), Unwin's book shares a preference for hand drawing in depicting buildings through plans, sections, and perspectives (it doesn't go so far as hand-lettering, though, like Ching did). While this hand-drawn approach could boil down to personal preference on the part of the authors, the more I've written my own illustrated architecture books, the more I've seen drawings as smart means of bypassing copyright issues. Whatever the case, Unwin's skilled, even hand pervades the book, giving it an appeal on par with Form, Space, & Order.

Although the name Analysing Architecture gives the impression, to me at least, that Unwin would be filling the book with case studies of important buildings and showing how they are organized (along the lines of Precedents in Architecture, another classic), such analyses take up a small portion of the book: 20 pages in the 2nd edition. Most of the book consists of general analyses structured into chapters such as "Modifying Elements in Architecture," "Architecture as Making Frames," and "Space and Structure." This makes sense, as it's better to educate students in principles of architecture before diving into case studies of important works (Vanna Venturi House, Woodland Chapel, etc.).

Yet this general to specific structure still leaves room for further exploration. Hence such books by Unwin as Twenty-Five Buildings Every Architect Should Understand and the Analysing Architecture Notebooks series, which dig deeply into concepts just touched upon in the original. The latter includes Shadow, the recent book that prompted me to take this shallow dip into Unwin's earlier book: the one that started it all.

Spreads (second edition, 2003):


Author Bio:

Simon Unwin is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Dundee, Scotland. He has lived in Great Britain and Australia, and taught or lectured on his work in China, Israel, India, Sweden, Turkey and the United States. ... Simon Unwin continues to teach at The Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, UK.

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