Review by Booklist Review
Some buildings we admire and love for their grace and beauty, others we ignore, still others we despise for their ugliness or discomfort. Brand and Hale sharpen our perception of architecture with their innovative observations and articulate criticism. Brand, of The Whole Earth Catalog fame, is fascinated by how buildings adapt, or "learn," over time. He has assembled 350 architectural photographs to illustrate his fresh, holistic, and easygoing discussion of how the process of architectural change comes about. Brand examines various sites and analyzes different types of residential, commercial, or institutional buildings. He scrutinizes interior change, often a matter of style rather than function, makes illuminating distinctions between growth, fashion, and conversion, and compares prestige versus vernacular architecture. Brand's ~lively survey embraces cathedrals and diners, libraries and garages, homes and post offices in San Francisco, Boston, Santa Fe, Washington, D.C., and a number of European locations. Some of his most innovative points relate to such nonaesthetic but nevertheless influential concerns as mortgages and the economies of real estate and the building industry; zoning, codes, and building inspectors; and the politics of preservation. Brand admires practicality over aesthetics, evolution over stasis, and is especially interested in successful adaptation and in why certain types of building forms proliferate. Brand and Hale are both involved with understanding which architectural elements work and which fail, but Hale is an architect, so he can write about design from the inside. He also establishes a broader, more conceptual, even lyrical context than Brand, incorporating discussions of cultural history and the spiritual dimension, going beyond Brand's nuts-and-bolts approach and entering into realms such as those Betty Edwards tackled in her Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1988). Hale writes about harmony and the echoing of nature's patterns in humanmade structures. He explains the Golden Proportion and the once mystical significance of geometry and decries the abrupt replacement of pattern with symbol in the early nineteenth century. Hale marks 1830 as the turning point in the decline of architectural standards and believes that it was the commercial revolution and its shoddy values that did in beauty, rather than industrialization. As he compares design features of the past that embodied balance and proportion with the poorly conceived buildings of our times, he gives voice to the sense of resentment we feel toward modern and postmodern styles. Finally, Hale is telling us that seeing is an acquirable skill, an art that architects have lost but can certainly regain. ~--Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In a compelling manifesto that addresses the puzzlement of why new buildings are so often ugly compared to those of earlier eras, Hale, a Boston architect and critic, argues that until around 1830 virtually every building was designed as a composition of interrelated elements in accordance with an age-old tradition of harmony, geometry and adaptation of natural forms. Beginning with the Greek Revival, he contends, this intuitive way of seeing and designing was lost, leading ultimately to the pretension, blandness and downright unattractiveness of most modern architecture. While praising the Bauhaus as a valiant attempt to reintegrate time-honored aesthetic values into the industrialized world, Hale deems the modernist International Style a failure. He proposes Frank Lloyd Wright's organic style as a touchstone for architects seeking to create buildings that are alive and resonant with meaning. This impassioned essay, interspersed with social history, includes scores of photographs of buildings, some of which are overlaid with what Hale calls a pattern of ``regulating lines'' that fit the elements of the design into a proportional system. As he shows, ``Whether the designer knew he was creating the pattern is less important than that the pattern is there.'' Illustrations. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Intended for the lay reader, this primer on design explores a number of interesting byways, from symbolism to scale, context, regulating lines, and pattern languages. Practiced New England architect and architectural writer Hale offers a paean to the past, more specifically a preindustrial past when, in his words, ``one could walk down any street and be surrounded by harmonious buildings.'' It all began to fall apart in the 1830s, according to Hale, when the Greek Revival replaced substance with symbol. Hale revolts at the prospect of a rampant industrialism and everything else Modern Architecture implied: internationalism, uniformity, and universalism. Gentle, wise, and perceptive, he is a child of postmodernism. Recommended for public libraries.-Peter Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An architect and critic elaborates on what most of us see when we look at much of modern architecture: buildings that are lifeless and just plain ugly. Hale laments the current state of architecture and the loss of ``harmonious design,'' an art that involves play and intuition. ``A great building can give us the same exhilaration we experience in a natural landscape,'' he writes. He urges architects and designers to rediscover the beauties of natural law and geometry, to abandon the fragmentation he sees as characteristic of postmodern architecture. He offers a historical summary of how building strayed, in the middle of the 19th century coincident with the Industrial Revolution, from the intuitive verities of harmony and balance, forsaking meaningful patterns for crude symbolism or somber functionality. Photos.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
