Monday 14 December 2009

Architecture

Finished December 13
50 Architects You Should Know
This is a good overview of the leading architects through history, arranged in historical order. It gives brief information about the architect themselves as well as the major buildings that they designed.
The pictures included are good quality and help to show the architect's work, but could have used more complete captions. I found that I sometimes had trouble orienting myself, especially when there was more than one picture of a building.
I would have liked to see more pictures, at least of all the buildings discussed for each architect. I found that when a building was discussed, yet no pictures included, I would have to go elsewhere to find out what the building looked like.
I also found the timelines not as useful as they could be, partly due to lack of explanation. The timelines ran across the top of every architect page, and included various historical events and lifetimes of artists, architect and designers. Sometimes I could see relationships between events and the architect whose page they were and sometimes not. Sometimes I could see influences cited to the artists and architects whose timelines appeared on an architect's page, sometimes not. But no pages included the life timeline for the given architect as part of this information. Separate information was given in a sidebar, but a life timeline would have made sense.
A good book to start with, but you will definitely want to use other sources of information as well.

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