The Look of Architecture. This item is unavailable.The Look of Architecture

Witold Rybczynski begins his book by stating that most architects deny that they fit into any stylistic form. We cannont, however, separate Frank Lloyd Wright from his hat and cape, or Le Corbusier from his heavy round glasses. Similarly, buildings present a public face that do not always betray their function. In this essay, he takes a short tour of modern architecture and talks about what style in architecture means. Rybczynski shows how style in clothing and architecture are related, and discusses why style became a taboo subject in the 20th-century. With descriptions of particular buildings, he examines the work of brilliant architects including Mies van der Rohe, Robert Venturi, and Frank Gehry, illustrating his argument that contrary to modernist dogma, form does not follow function. Rybczynski leaves the reader with a fresh way of looking at architecture.

Witold Rybczynski is one of America's best known writers on architecture, the author of the bestselling One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw, Home, Waiting for the Weekend, The Most Beautiful House in the World, and A Clearing in the Distance. He has also written on architecture for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, and The New York Review of Books. The Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, he lives in Philadelphia.