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Terms and conditions applyTravels in the History of Architecture
Robert Harbison
Product details
Format: Book
Pages: 287
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Date Published: Jan 2011
Stock Code: 74074
ISBN: 9781861898180
Binding: Paperback
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Description
The 20th century architect Mies van der Rohe once declared that ‘Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together.’ In Travels in the History of Architecture renowned architectural writer Robert Harbison looks closely at such bricks, taking us on a journey through the great themes and movements of architecture, from antiquity to the present day. Using his own experience of the physical fabric of buildings, Harbison interprets the conceptions of the original architects and makers, pointing out carefully crafted detail and inspiring form along the way
Beginning with the great temples and tombs of the Egyptians, and the monuments and shrines of Greek and Roman architecture, and concluding with the museums of the twenty-first century, each chapter of Harbison’s Travels focuses on a moment in architectural history, with chapters devoted to, among others, Byzantine, Baroque, Mannerism, Historicism and Functionalism. His free-ranging approach draws in references from history, literature and art to illuminate his theme: from a poem praising marble decoration to help us understand how its makers saw Hagia Sophia, to a French Rococo painting to probe the meaning of an English landscape garden.
Approachable, idiosyncratic yet authoritative, Harbison’s account works equally well as an enlivening introduction to the history of architecture, or as a refreshingly different take on familiar territory for those who are ready to see old buildings in energising new ways.
Featured Reviews
Paul Shepheard, author of Artifical Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture and The Cultivated Wilderness
Robert Harbison is not one of those historians who tries to blast you out of the water with his authority – his is a gentle voice, full of knowledge and wit, thoughtful and contemplative. As you read this book you feel not that you are being lectured at, but, as the title suggests, that you are travelling in time; and Harbison makes a fine travelling companion. Whatever you are doing with old buildings, whether visiting them, reading about them, looking at pictures of them or even just remembering them, you will want to have this book near at hand.
RIBA Journal
Robert Harbison is a deliciously poetic architectural historian who pursues ideas like scents running hither and thither. His rich work always makes a refreshing and readable change from the exhaustive PhD-disciplined linear conventionality of his contemporaries – he believes in his own thinking . . . of all Harbison's books this is the one most likely to unexpectedly get under your skin.
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