A Theory of Architecture

Product Description

More than a decade in the making, this is a textbook of architecture, useful for every architect: from first-year students, to those taking senior design studio, to graduate students writing a Ph.D. dissertation in architectural theory, to experienced practicing architects. It is very carefully written so that it can be read even by the beginning architecture student. The information contained here is a veritable gold mine of design techniques.

This book teaches the reader how to design by adapting to human needs and sensibilities, yet independently of any particular style. Here is a unification of genuine architectural knowledge that brings a new clarity to the discipline. It explains much of what people instinctively know about architecture, and puts that knowledge for the first time in a concise, understandable form.

Dr. Salingaros has experience in the organization of the built environment that few practicing architects have. The later chapters of this new book touch on very sensitive topics: what drives architects to produce the forms they build; and why architects use only a very restricted visual vocabulary. Is it personal inventiveness, or is it something more, which perhaps they are not even aware of? There has not been such a book treating the very essence of architecture. The only other author who is capable of raising a similar degree of passion (and controversy) is Christopher Alexander, who happens to be Dr. Salingaros’ friend and architectural mentor.

From the Author

This new edition of the book adds an Index to the original Chapters, which are otherwise unchanged. I recently used this text for a course on architectural theory, along with Christopher Alexander’s “The Nature of Order: Book I”, and the course material (excluding readings from the two textbooks) became the new book “Unified Architectural Theory”.

From the Inside Flap

“The idea that the majority of all possible buildings do not have living structure had, perhaps, never even occurred to people before about 1980, when my colleagues and I first raised the issue. In traditional society, most traditional methods were structure-preserving. No one ever identified the huge class [of dead structures] because nearly all buildings actually made, or even imagined, up to about 1900, were part of [the class of living structures]. The discovery that human beings have the option to choose — and the capability to make — ugly, strange buildings which do not preserve the structure of the Earth, is new. It is really only recently, in the late 20th century, that we discovered that the class [of dead structures] exists, and that we can not merely conceive, but actually build such buildings. We discovered it during the manic gyrations of the 20th century when absurd and horrible buildings first became known. Such unnatural things had hardly ever been created before. But all of a sudden, during the 20th century, for the first time it became obvious that architects could build absurdities. This became all too obvious with the huge corpus of 20th-century building work.” — Christopher Alexander.

From the Back Cover

“Surely no voice is more thought-provoking than that of this intriguing, perhaps historically important, new thinker?” — From the Preface by His Royal Highness, Charles, The Prince of Wales.
 
“A New Vitruvius for 21st-Century Architecture and Urbanism?” — Dr. Ashraf Salama. Chair, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar. 

“Architecture, Salingaros argues, is governed by universal and intuitively understood principles, which have been exemplified by all successful styles and in all civilizations that have left a record of themselves in their buildings. The solution is not to return to the classical styles… the solution is to return to first principles and build within their constraints…” — Dr. Roger Scruton, Philosopher, London, UK.

“A fundamental text, among the most significant