Customer Reviews

Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture

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good collection of essays and ideas about the meaning of Architecture through different authors along the 20th century. It's not a dictionary nor gives the whole understanding of the overlaping of styles, but shows condensed points of view about various topics.

This little green book is like an encylopedia of contemporary famous architects' writings and is a good source for students or layman with not much architectural theory background.

A complete and utter waste; the excerpts in this volume are so short - averaging a page and a half each - that they are completely useless. Please do not waste your money like I did. You can learn more about the authors and theories on Comedy Central than you can by reading the thirty second sound-bites in this waste of paper and ink

This collection of texts by Mr. Jencks and Mr. Kropf is a post-modern piece of work: joining different ideas as they were equivalent. At the same time it looks like a way to inform about the theories and manifestoes, in fact, it is a reductive and destructive thing because the pieces of writing don't show the real ideas of the architects. The book gives the same importance to entire complex books, short comments about buildings, magazine interviews, etc. They are not equivalent, people should be more respectful with the work of the other ones, mainly when their work is to teach and to help understanding.