The Elements of Modern Architecture

The Elements of Modern Architecture: Understanding Contemporary Buildings

Antony Radford, Amit Srivastava, Selen Morkoc
Thames & Hudson, September 2020 (Second Edition)

Hardcover | 12 x 9 inches | 360 pages | 2,500+ illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-0500023624 | $50.00

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

This ambitious publication, now revised and expanded, analyzes what makes buildings meaningful and enduring. Organized chronologically, influential buildings from the past seven decades are presented along with detailed consideration of their key characteristics: site and surrounding, space and massing, details and ornamentation, and fenestration and natural light. The wide-ranging case studies cover everything from residences to opera houses and include sites from every continent. The Elements of Modern Architecture reflects on why each building is a memorable contribution to the field of architecture based on its innovative forms, inventive construction, and/or exemplary responses to climate, surroundings, local traditions, and culture.

In an age where computer imagery has become commonplace, the over 2,500 painstakingly hand-drawn images presented in this book help readers return to the core values of understanding memorable architecture: looking with the eyes, engaging through direct physical experience, and questioning how the design responds to place, people, and construction.

Dr. Antony Radford is an urban designer and emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Adelaide, Australia. His recent books include Understanding Sustainable Architecture and Digital Design: A Critical Introduction. Dr. Amit Srivastava is an architectural historian at the University of Adelaide who has lived and worked in India and Australia. Dr. Selen Morkoç is a writer and critic who has practiced and taught architecture and theory in Turkey and at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

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dDAB COMMENTARY:

The first edition of The Elements of Modern Architecture, released in 2014, boasts of more than 2,500 drawings. With 50 projects explained by them, that equates to an average of at least 50 drawings per project. Although the just-released second edition boasts of the same rough number of drawings for 55 projects, effectively bringing down the average, that's still a hell of a lot of drawings being used to explain works of modern and contemporary architecture completed over a half-century span. As a firm believer in the importance of architectural drawings for design, education, and presentation, among other things, The Elements of Modern Architecture is an irresistible book.

The book by Australian educators Antony Radford, Amit Srivastava and Selen Morkoc opts for a landscape orientation, so immediately it brings to mind Francis D.K. Ching's classic Architecture: Form, Space, and Order. Although Ching's book, first published in 1979, changed over subsequent editions — most notably moving to a more typical portrait orientation and ditching the hand-lettering in favor of a computer font based on the author's own hand — the balance of text and images is very important, as is the way these elements are laid out on each two-page spread. It appears that the Aussie trio was inspired by Ching, with one difference: the addition of red for emphasis.

Subtitled "Understanding Contemporary Buildings," The Elements of Modern Architecture does just that: it uses drawings to explain 55 important buildings, from Le Corbusier's Sarabhai House (1955) to MAD Architects' Harbin Opera House (2015). Most of the buildings are more famous than these two buildings (e.g., Salk Institute, Sydney Opera House, Lloyd's of London, Thermal Baths in Vals, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, MAXXI), thereby making the book particularly valuable for students assigned precedent studies in their design studios. Professors worried that students could mine everything from this single source shouldn't be too concerned, though, since the analyses are focused mainly on context, followed by form, building elements, and certain details particular to each building; the analyses are not comprehensive, even as they appear so at first glance, given the dozens of drawings per project.

Related to context, an overriding concern for the authors, one that's explained briefly in the introduction, is "responsive cohesion," a concept taken from environmental philosopher Warwick Fox. I was not familiar with the idea, but the authors define it as the "quality of the relations between the internal components of a 'thing' ... and between the 'thing' and its contexts." Furthermore, "the parts answer to each other in such a way as to generate, maintain or contribute to the overall cohesion of the whole." In other words, the relation of parts within a building is important, but not as important as a building's relationship to its context, be it physical, social, climatic and so on. That interest on the part of the authors comes across clearly in the book.

With so many of the 55 numbered buildings considered architectural icons and therefore being on many architects' lists of must-see places, the book could also be used as a tool for learning more about a building, or perhaps gaining new perspectives on it; in this sense, the book is not just for students. While there is very little additional information for me in #27, Thermal Baths in Vals, since it's both a building I've visited and own an in-depth case study about, other analyses on buildings I've just visited yield an abundance of new takes, be it Lord's Media Centre by Future Systems (#23), for instance, or 41 Cooper Square by Morphosis (#50). In all cases, the most valuable aspect of the book is the ability of the drawings to hone in on particular design features and thereby explain just why a building looks the way it does.

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