A History of Architecture Settings and Rituals

by Kostof, Spiro; Tobias, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780195034738
• ISBN10: 0195034732
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1985-03-21
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

When the late Spiro Kostof's A History of Architecture appeared in 1985, it was universally hailed as a masterpiece--one of the finest books on architecture ever written. The New York Times Book Review, in a front cover review, called it "a magnificent guided tour through mankind's architecture," and The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that "Kostof...has enthralled a generation of students.... Now he has done the same thing for the public at large, in an extraordinary book that is a new kind of architectural history."This magisterial work has now been revised and expanded by Greg Castillo, Kostof's colleague and literary executor. Insightful, engagingly written, and graced with almost a thousand superb illustrations, the Second Edition of this classic volume offers a sweeping narrative that examines architecture as it reflects the social, economic, and technological systems of human history. The scope of the book is astonishing. No mere survey of famous buildings, Kostof's History examines a surprisingly wide variety of manmade structures: prehistoric huts and the TVA, the pyramids at Giza and the Rome railway station, the ziggurat and the department store. Indeed, Kostof considered every building worthy of attention, every structure or shelter a potential source of insight, whether it be the prehistoric hunting camps at Terra Amata, or the caves at Lascaux with their magnificent paintings, or a twenty-story hotel on the Las Vegas strip. The Second Edition features a new concluding chapter, "Designing the Fin de Siecle," based on Kostof's last lecture notes and prepared by Castillo, as well as an all-new 16-page color section. Many of the original line drawings by Richard Tobias, as well as some 50 photographs, have also been updated or replaced, for improved clarity.Visually and intellectually stimulating, this book is at once a compelling history and an indispensable reference on all aspects of our built environment. It achieves for architecture what Janson's history accomplished for visual art.

Table of Contents

A Place On Earth

The Study of What We Built

The Cave and the Sky: Stone Age Europe

The Rise of the City: Architecture in Western Asia

The Architecture of Ancient Egypt

Bronze Age Cities: The Aegean and Asia Minor

Greek Temple and ""Barbarian"" Alternatives

Polis and Akropolis

The Hellenistic Realm

Rome: Caput Mundi

The World at Large: Roman Concurrences

Measuring Up

The Triumph of Christ

The Mediterranean in the Early Middle Ages

The Birth of Nations: Europe after Charles

The French Manner

The Urbanization of Europe

Edges of Medievalism

The Renaissance: Ideal and Fad

Spain and the New World

Istanbul and Venice

The Popes as Planners: Rome 150-1650

Absolutism and Bourgeoisie: European Architecture 1600-1750

The Search For Self

Architecture for a New World

Architectural Art and the Landscape of Industry

The American Experience

Victorian Environments

The Trials of Modernism

Architecture and the State: Interwar Years

At Peace with the Past: The Last Decades

Designing the Fin-de-Siecle

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.