SeCRETS of ARCHITECTURE

The SeCRETS of ARCHITECTURE series of eBooks explores the underlying architecture of significant buildings, gardens, urban compositions from around the world and all periods of history and prehistory. The aim of the series is to get inside the minds of architects, wherever and whenever they operated, by analyzing their work. Each eBook focuses on a particular example. The methodology for analysis is based on that illustrated in my books Analysing ARCHITECTURE (Routledge, 2009) and Twenty Buildings Every Architect Should Understand (Routledge, 2010).

Analysing Architecture

Many people find it difficult learning to do architecture. Initially it can be like asking your brain to do something for which it has no frame of reference. Generally speaking, pre-university education does not prepare the creative mind for the peculiar challenges of architecture. I have known intelligent people – A-grade students in literary or science subjects, unused to academic difficulty – whose confidence has been knocked when faced with the challenges of architecture. Back in the 1990s, I wrote this book to help and, through subsequent editions, revised and expanded it to make it better. This is the fifth edition, complete with new chapters and a subtitle which is explained in the Introduction.

The theory of architecture the book presents remains the same. Even so, in response to comments gleaned from a survey of users conducted by my publisher, I continue to try to express it more clearly and thoroughly.

There are a few significant changes. The Case Studies at the end of previous editions have been omitted and much of the material contained in them redistributed amongst earlier chapters. Alternative and more thorough case studies can be found in the sister book Twenty-Five Buildings Every Architect Should Understand (2017). The Case Studies have been replaced by a completely rewritten chapter on ‘How Analysis Can Help Design’, moved from its position early in the book and placed at the end, where references can be made back to examples in earlier chapters. The chapter on ‘Temples and Cottages’ has been moved near the end too, for similar reasons.

In addition, four extra chapters have been added under the banner ‘Themes in Spatial Organisation’: on ‘Axis’, ‘Grid’, ‘Datum Place’ and ‘Hidden’. Other themes relating to Analysing Architecture can be found, treated at greater length, in the separate volumes of the Analysing Architecture Notebook series.

An Architecture Notebook: Wall

An Architecture Notebook builds on the foundation of Simon Unwin's previous book Analysing Architecture (Routledge, 1997). Using numerous examples, illustrated with clear line drawings, this volume describes and illustrates the many powers attaching to one of the most basic architectural elements – the wall.

Exploring its primitive origins in relation to the natural walls of cliffs and caves, illustrating the effects and opportunities of its evolution into the artificial and then the naked cave, and examining the ways in which it is used to frame and organise the spaces of our lives, this book presents the wall as one of the most powerful inventions of the mind.

Like its predecessor, An Architecture Notebook is a stimulus to thinking about what one can do with architecture. It offers an example to student architects of how they might keep their own architecture notebooks, collecting ideas, sorting strategies, generally expanding their understanding of the potential of architecture to change the world.

Doorway

Remember that frisson as you step through a doorway: into a crowded party or a silent church; for a job interview, or into your own home after a long journey. Though we take them for granted, doorways impinge on our lives in many ways. Their thresholds divide up the world, punctuating our movements from place to place and creating 'fault-lines' in our experience. Their mystery intrigues and challenges us. We measure ourselves against them and they set down the geometry of our relationships. Doorways affect our emotions and influence how we behave; sitting on a doorstep, we can find peace just watching the world go by. Framing the transient moment, doorways stand as reminders of the 'between' in which we live. It is no wonder that through human history and across all cultures, doorways have possessed great symbolic power and had ceremonies and rituals associated with them.

Doorway is a profound but accessible and entertaining exploration of the ways our built surroundings set out the spatial matrix of our existence. Using examples from archaeology to the present, and from all around the world, this book provides a fresh and revealing perspective on architecture and its poetry.

Twenty-Five+ Buildings Every Architect Should Understand

Architects live by ideas. But where do they come from? And how do they shape buildings? There is no one right way to do architecture. This book illustrates many. Its aim is to explore the rich diversity of architectural creativity by analysing a wide range of examples to extract the ideas behind them.

Twenty-Five+ Buildings Every Architect Should Understand is a companion to Simon Unwin’s  Analysing Architecture: the Universal Language of Place-Making (most recent edition, 2021), and part of the trilogy which also includes his Exercises in Architecture: Learning to Think as an Architect (second edition, 2022). Together the three books offer an introduction to the workings of architecture providing for the three aspects of learning: theory, examples and practice. Twenty-Five+ Buildings focuses on analysing examples using the methodology offered by Analysing Architecture, which operates primarily through the medium of drawing.

An underlying theme of Twenty-Five+ Buildings Every Architect Should Understand is the relationship of architecture to the human being, how it frames our lives and orchestrates our experiences; how it can help us give form to the world and contributes to our senses of identity and place. Exploring these dimensions through case studies that illustrate the rich diversity of twentieth- and twenty-first-century architecture, this book is essential reading, and hopefully an inspiration, for every architect.

In this new edition, supplementary analysis and discussion has been added to each of the twenty-five case studies, drawing attention to their influences from and on other architects. A number of extra shorter analyses have been included too, following the practice of presenting extra small dishes interspersed among main courses in high-end restaurants. These additional short analyses account for the + sign after ‘Twenty-Five’ in the title of this edition, and double the number of buildings analysed to around fifty.

Exercises in Architecture

This revised edition of Exercises in Architecture: Learning to Think as an Architect is full of new content, building on the success of the previous edition. All the original exercises have been revised and new ones added, with the format changing to allow the inclusion of more supplementary material. The aim remains the same, to help pre- or early-course architecture students begin and develop their ability to think as architects.

Learning to do architecture is tricky. It involves awakening abilities that remain dormant in most people. It is like learning language for the first time; a task made more mystifying by the fact that architecture deals not in words but in places: places to stand, to walk, to sit, to hide, to sleep, to cook, to eat, to work, to play, to worship...

This book was written for those who want to be architects. It suggests a basis for early experiences in a school of architecture; but it could also be used in secondary schools and colleges, or as self-directed preparation for students in the months before entering professional education.

Exercises in Architecture builds on and supplements the methodology for architectural analysis presented in the author's previous book Analysing Architecture: the Universal Language of Place-Making (fifth edition, 2021) and demonstrated in his Twenty-Five Buildings Every Architect Should Understand (Routledge, 2015). Together, the three books deal with the three aspects of learning any creative discipline: 1. Analysing Architecture provides a methodology for analysis that develops an understanding of the way architecture works; 2. Twenty-Five Buildings explores and extends that methodology through analysis of examples as case studies; and 3. Exercises in Architecture offers a way of expanding understanding and developing fluency by following a range of rudimentary and more sophisticated exercises.

Those who wish to become professional architects (wherever in the world they might be) must make a conscious effort to learn the universal language of architecture as place-making, to explore its powers and how they might be used. The exercises in this book are designed to help.

The Ten Most Influential Buildings in History: Architecture's Archetypes

Even the most inventive and revolutionary architects of today owe debts to the past, often to the distant past when architecture really was being invented for the first time. Architects depend on their own imaginations for personal insights and originality but their ideas may be stimulated (consciously or subliminally) by particularly powerful buildings from history. The Ten Most Influential Buildings in History: Architecture’s Archetypes identifies ten architectural archetypes that have been sources of inspiration for architects through the centuries. Each archetype is analysed through distinctive examples, following the methodology established by the author in his previous books. The variety of ‘lines of enquiry’ each archetype has provoked in latter-day architects is then explored by analysing their work to reveal ideas inspired by those earlier buildings. Archetypes have a timeless relevance. In adopting this approach, The Ten Most Influential Buildings in History is as pertinent to contemporary practice as it is to understanding buildings from antiquity, and offers insights into the bridges of influence that can operate between the two.

Metaphor

Metaphor is the most powerful component of the poetry of architecture. It has been a significant factor in architecture since the earliest periods of human history, when people were finding ways to give order and meaning to the world in which we live. It is arguable that architecture began with the realisation of metaphor in physical form, and that subsequent movements – from Greek to Gothic, Renaissance to Modern, Victorian to Vernacular… – have all been driven by the emergence or rediscovery of different metaphors by which architecture might be generated.

Curve

Curve is a divisive issue in architecture. Some see curves as expensive and decadent; others as an expression of transcendence – a way that the human mind can express its freedom from quotidian constraints. Yet others use curves to emulate some of the most beautiful forms in nature. This Notebook considers the various authorities to which architects look for the generation of their curves. It also considers the aspirations curves manifest in architectural form.

Shadow

Shadows may be insubstantial but they are, nevertheless, an important element in architecture. In prehistoric times we sought shade as a refuge from the hot sun and chilling rain. Through history architects have used shadows to draw, to mould form, to paint pictures, to orchestrate atmosphere, to indicate the passing of time… as well as to identify place. Sometimes shadow can be the substance of architecture.