Architecture Today

This lushly illustrated, 500-page compendium is indispensable for any student of architecture, and many professional architects should find it a handy, although heavy, reference guide. James Steele covers the world of contemporary architecture with style, insight, historical perspective, and--perhaps most helpful--a powerful sense of organization. In his capable hands, a vast amount of information falls neatly into place under sixteen chapter headings: The Modernist Legacy, European Rationalism, High Tech, Minimalism, The Classical Revival, Post-Modernism, Deconstructivism, Contemporary Vernacular, The New Expressionists, Ecological Architecture, The New Moderns, Populist Architecture, Megastructures, The Los Angeles Avant-Garde, Experimentation in Japan, and World Cities. The balanced text is multi-faceted. Steele can list the sources of Post-Modernist architecture (correcting the popular view that the movement was an attempt to do away with Modernism) or suggestively draw a correspondence between the roofscape of Gustav Peichl's Federal Art Gallery in Bonn and the use of nature in David Lynch's film Blue Velvet.

As with so many architecture books from Phaidon Press, the picture editors and book designers have carefully matched the photographs to the text, and have given precisely the right kind of caption information for each one. The back of the book includes brief architect's biographies, chapter notes, a lengthy bibliography, and a chronology from 1945 to 1997. This beautifully produced book is a one-volume course on postwar architecture and the social and political milieu in which it exists. --Peggy Moorman