Discovering Architecture: How the World’s Great Buildings Were Designed and Built

Books explaining architecture to a general audience are a commendable if tiny segment of books on the subject. Yet as architects ask for a more educated public in matters of architecture, there is room for much improvement. For every Understanding Architecture or How Architecture Works there is Architecture for Dummies or some other title that is lacking in how to convey the most elementary information. So Philip Jodidio’s Discovering Architecture is a welcome addition to the genre, with its wide-ranging selection of buildings, large color photos, and inventive captions.

Jodidio (a prolific author who seems to pen ten books on a slow year) normally focuses on contemporary buildings by big-name architects, but less than twenty of the fifty buildings collected in this coffee table book were completed after 1900; only two since 2000. Most of the selection “from the Christian era to the present” is fairly obvious, be it Hagia Sophia, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, the Bauhaus, or the Guggenheim Bilbao. This is to be expected with such an overview. And while Jodidio is not afraid to venture to Asia beyond the usual European and North American masterpieces, only one building in Australia and South America each are found, and none from Africa. But this does not detract from the book’s strong presentation.

Each of the 50 buildings is treated in the same manner: one page of descriptive text faces a full-bleed, full-page photo (many, but not all of the projects have two more pages of photos). In between the text and photo is a gray page with rectangular die cuts and captions describing the respective views onto the photo underneath. These die-cut captions highlight the important formal aspects of each building (the photos typically show the exterior, but sometimes the interior, such as with Grand Central Terminal), but they also educate the reader on how to “read” architecture through photographs. This tactic makes a good deal of sense given today’s preference for documenting buildings, old and new, through photography.

The die cuts and captions elevate the book above a fairly cursory presentation of 50 great buildings—in addition to the above criticism about geography, I wish there were just more photos. On first reading the windows in the gray pages also add a bit of surprise to the chronological journey through architecture, making it fun even for the most knowledgeable architecture buffs.