Description:

Essays on Architecture contains twelve texts (with illustrations) on a variety of topics that engage architecture, history, theory, philosophy, and popular culture. There are four thematic sections: Architecture & Mobility (academic tourism and literary readings of Rome; an architectural AutoBiography), Philosophy & Aesthetics (the figure of the collector in Walter Benjamin’s work; the idyll in 19th-century representations of interiors in Germany; the joints between beauty, ugliness, and caricature in the work of Karl Rosenkranz), Case Studies (Las Vegas and water management; Koolhaas’ design of Euralille; the history and theory of Princeton’s architecture building), and History, Theory, and Practice in Gottfried Semper’s Work (the effect of Semper’s ideas on architects in the US; two comparative design studies (Semper and Schinkel, Semper and Paxton); a detailed examination of Semper’s most unusual work, the Treichler laundry ship). A bibliography and index are included.