Architecture - Marvin Trachtenberg

This highly regarded, consistently well-selling and extremely well-written book brings to life architectural history and its canon of great buildings through a lively approach that is both insightful and accurate. This story of architecture moves back and forth between long views of historical trends and close-ups of major works and crucial architectural themes. The authors have successfully made the subject of architectural history - which due to its technical aspects can too often be off-putting to the lay reader - transparent, engaging, and easily mastered. All buildings are illustrated with effective images that are well reproduced and thoughtfully keyed to the text. In the second edition, the content of the book has been fine-tuned and polished. Sections in the Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern chapters were reworked to include recent scholarship and, in the case of the Baroque, expand coverage to Eastern Europe. The Introduction has been significantly updated in its slant and language, including a discussion of the newly introduced term "Postmodernity.";The most significant and exciting change, however, is the addition of the new chapter, which covers architectural developments from approximately 1980 to 2000. The new chapter is a challenging yet comprehensible take on the exciting, diverse, and stunning buildings from the last twenty years. Most impressively, the author creates a cohesive story from these recent buildings that are, by their very nature, extremely complex, individualistic, and difficult to categorise.