Stephen Bayley

The story of architecture in 100 buildings

Witold Rybczynski’s majestic survey takes us from Brittany in 4,800 BC to Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Gehry

The Great Mosque at Kairouan. [Marek Szarejko/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0]

One recent estimate claims there are 4.732 billion buildings on Earth, but it’s difficult to establish a credible methodology to count them. Is Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, created out of swaggering pride and ambition, in the same category as a shanty hut in an Algerian bidonville? Unless you live in a desert, buildings are unavoidable, making architecture not just a necessity for survival but the art form most pregnant with meaning.

When I was a boy I wanted to be an architect. Not because I was interested in drain schedules, load paths, wrangling with local authorities or designing kitchen extensions but because architecture seemed the most powerful expression of style. We know and judge cultures by their monuments, not their facility for credit default swaps. And the apex of any culture is expressed in history’s best buildings: New York in the mid-20th century, Victorian Britain, Medici Florence, and so on.

In my school days, the way to get a handle on all of this was an awful brick of a book by Banister Fletcher called A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. Ugly drawings were printed on nasty coated paper that smelt. Fletcher was a deterrent to all but the messianically committed. Today’s student-amateur of buildings is more fortunate to have Witold Rybczynski’s The Story of Architecture. It is a calm, gentlemanly and intelligent book. But the title makes a self-conscious nod to E.H. Gombrich’s superb The Story of Art, which has been through 16 editions since 1950. Is the implied ambition justified?

Rybczynski was born in Edinburgh but moved to Canada, where he taught at McGill. He is presently emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1986, when his Home became a surprise bestseller, he has been something of a celebrity in the United States, despite the New York Times’s reviewer finding that this hymn to domesticity had ‘little analytic penetration of its principal notions’.

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