Review by Choice Review
Mitrovic (Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, NZ) is a historian of architecture who has published extensively on traditional theory. He wants this short, readable book to open the eyes of people involved in architecture and undermine architecture's current legitimizing dogmas. He argues that architects should design buildings whose appearance people can enjoy without thinking about it, while thinking about it increases the enjoyment. The exception is within modernism, where the enjoyment of architecture always combines seeing and thinking. When modernist architecture's social programs collapsed, leaving buildings without content, studio instructors began filling the void by applying material from philosophy, aesthetics, the psychology of vision, literary criticism, and other new, extra-architectural material that began appearing in the 1950s. This book presents the next generation's refutation of much of that material, along with new research to argue for a return of the visual to studio instruction. Although very narrowly construed, the book is worthy of perusal by everyone involved in any capacity in architecture. A more comprehensive review of modernism's deficiencies, though perhaps incomprehensible to architecture's intelligentsia, is Samir Younes's The Imperfect City: On Architectural Judgment (2012). Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. C. W. Westfall University of Notre Dame
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
