Crucial Words

It's an unusual thing to find a book on architecture with hardly any pictures, almost total reliance on text and taking as its subject a series of crucial questions relating to 31 buzzwords which enjoy enormous popularity in trade journals, descriptive texts and architectural workshops, where they tend to dominate the discussion. From A for "Atmosphere" via B for "Branding" and M for "Memory" to W for "Why" - Gert Wingardh and Rasmus Waern, respected architects and critics in Sweden, have made a book out of an ingenious idea.

They invited a number of architects, or in the case of the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk an architect manqué, to ruminate on one of these buzzwords and express their thoughts in an essay. The result is a range of very diverse articles by contributors such as Denise Scott Brown, Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani, Juhani Pallasmaa, Joseph Rykwart and Hans Ibelings under the general statement that: "Both genesis and perception demand their descriptions. There's more to the picture than meets the eye."

One of the most memorable essays takes us on a stroll with Orhan Pamuk through the old town of Istanbul, based on one level on the question "Why didn't I become an architect?" and on another level providing a classical fugue on the theme of the imagination: "So the imagination in question is not in service to a person who is creating new worlds on a blank sheet of paper, it is in service to someone who is trying to fit in with a world already made."

One negative aspect which needs pointing out is that the few pictures are ineffectual and tend to interrupt the flow of thought rather than to illustrate it. The book would have been better off without them.

Gert Wingardth and Rasmus Waern (publishers)
212 pages, 25 illustrations in colour
17 x 24 cm, soft cover
Verlag Birkhäuser Basel, Boston, Berlin 2008
24.90 EUR, 42.90 CHF
Text English
ISBN-13: 978-3-7643-8645-0