How much do you know about Greek architecture? Roman? Gothic? The Renaissance? Modernism? Perhaps more importantly, do you know how these are connected or how one style evolved to become another? Or what happened historically during each of these periods? Architectural History Retold is your roadmap for your journey through architectural history. Offering a fresh take on what the author calls the ‘Great Enlightenment project’, it traces the grand narrative of western architecture in one concise, accessible volume. Starting in Ancient Greece and leading up to the present day, Paul Davies' unconventional, engaging style brings the past back to life, helping you to think beyond separate components and styles to recognise ‘the bigger picture’. The author is an academic and journalist with three decades of experience in introducing students to architectural history. The book is based on his successful entry-level course which has used the same unstuffy approach to break down barriers to understanding and engagement and inspire generations of students.

This book presents a collection of recent writings on architecture and urbanism in the United States, with topics ranging from colonial to contemporary times.

The Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius declared firmitas, utilitas, and venustas-firmness, commodity, and delight- to be the three essential attributes of architecture. These qualities are brilliantly explored in this book, which uniquely comprises both a detailed survey of Western architecture, including Pre-Columbian America, and an introduction to architecture from the Middle East, India, Russia, China, and Japan. The text encourages readers to examine closely the pragmatic, innovative, and aesthetic attributes of buildings, and to imagine how these would have been praised or criticized by contemporary observers. Artistic, economic, environmental, political, social, and technological contexts are discussed so as to determine the extent to which buildings met the needs of clients, society at large, and future generations.

This book takes a bird's eye view of architecture in time, and explores the different ways architects have responded to civilizations, giving them the buildings and cities they deserve.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.