Key Houses of the Twentieth Century
Colin Davies
W. W. Norton, October 2006
Paperback | 10 x 11-1/2 inches | 240 pages | English | ISBN: 978-0393732054 | $45.00
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
A companion to the popular Key Buildings of the Twentieth Century, this book includes classic residential works by such seminal architects as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Alvar Aalto, as well as houses by more recent masters such as Tadao Ando, Rem Koolhaas, and Glen Murcutt.
It provides accurate scale plans of every floor, together with elevations, sections, and site plans where appropriate, for each house. All have been specially drawn for the purpose and are based on the most up-to-date information and sources. Amplified with full-color views of the houses, a concise text explains the significant architectural features of each building and the influences it shows or generated. Cross-references to other buildings in the book highlight the various connections between these key houses. The introduction discusses the idea of an architectural canon of houses and gives an overview of the development of the house in the twentieth century. The quality and number of the drawings allow the houses to be understood in detail and, together with the authoritative text and images, make this book indispensable for all students of modern architecture. As an added bonus, the book includes a CD-ROM containing digital files of all the drawings.
Colin Davies is professor at London Metropolitan University and the author of a number of books, including High Tech Architecture (1988), Hopkins: The Work of Michael Hopkins and Partners (two volumes, 1996-2004), and Prefabricated Home (2005).
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
A few days ago I lamented the small floor plans in the otherwise rewarding 20/20: Twenty Great Houses of the Twentieth Century by John Pardey. Thinking about floor plans of famous single-family houses prompted me to pull off my shelf Key Houses of the Twentieth Century, where plans are in abundance. As the subtitle makes clear, the book's focus is drawings: plans, sections and elevations of 20th century houses, from Peter Behrens's own house completed in 1901 to a few houses built in Europe and Asia in the year 2000.
Years ago I reviewed two other books in Norton's "Key Buildings ... Plans, Sections and Elevations" series, both published in 2008, a couple years after Colin Davies' book on houses: Key Contemporary Buildings by Rob Gregory and Key Urban Housing of the Twentieth Century by Hilary French. In one of those reviews I similarly critiqued the petite size of the plans on the page, but I also pointed out that the CD-ROM accompanying the book, with its EPS and DWG files for each project, made up for this visual deficiency. The inclusion of the digital files makes the series perfect for students, who can use them as a starting point for precedent studies.
So how well do the books and discs work together, especially Key Houses of the Twentieth Century? Each house — 106 of them in total — is given a two-page spread, with one or two photos and descriptive text on the left page, and the drawings on the right page. The plans, sections and elevations are drawn simply and consistently, with numbered keys labeling the spaces in the plans. The houses vary in size dramatically, so there is not one single scale at which they're drawn; nevertheless a visual scale and north arrow are at the bottom of each drawing page. If I had made the book, I would have either shaded the elevations (as is the thin-line drawings aren't descriptive enough) or, better yet, provided more sections.
What about the CD-ROM? It functions simply as a directory, with 106 folders numbered "001" to "106." Inside each folder are two files in EPS and DWG format, each one named according to the number (e.g., 30.dwg, 30.eps). All of the plans, sections and elevations are lumped into individual files, laid out similarly, if not exactly, to the pages in the book. The drawings are simply lines, free of the labels that appear in the book. To navigate the numbers, one has to look at the last page of the book, opposite the CD-ROM sleeve glued to the inside of the back cover, where a list of the 106 houses is found. Although the houses are numbered in the order they appear in the book, they are NOT numbered on their respective spreads; this is frustrating as it requires readers to take that extra step of going to the back page to know what number a particular house is. An easy fix would have been to name the folders and files so they're more descriptive: "000_Behrens-House.dwg," for instance. These names would also help people who have the files on their computer but don't have the book in front of them: "What's 29? Let's click and see — it's Tugendhat House!" (See screenshots at bottom.)
So Key Houses of the Twentieth Century, like 20/20, has its own drawbacks, but they are compounded by the fact it combines print and digital media. The series, best I know, stopped around the time of this book ten or twelve years ago, so critiques of its layout and formatting now won't lead to improvements in future releases or updates. But I hope it draws attention to the usability of books, particularly illustrated architecture books: authors and publishers need to be aware of how architects use information and how they navigate it. Drawings are valuable to architects, but so is the time they spend finding them.
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