100 Years of Architecture by Alan Powers
Laurence King, 2016
Hardcover, 304 pages

[All images courtesy of Laurence King]

About halfway through writing my just-released book, 100 Years, 100 Buildings, my editor at Prestel sent me a PDF of Alan Powers' 100 Years of Architecture, then in progress but at a more advanced stage. Even before opening the file to skim it, the relevance to my book was obvious, and I knew there would be plenty of overlap in the projects each of us selected as significant in the last hundred years.

Finally receiving a print version of the book about a month ago, I couldn't help focusing on the differences, on of which was readily apparent at first glance: the cover photo is the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58 in Brussels, a pavilion designed by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis that was, like most Expo projects, torn down. While my book limits itself to projects that people can visit, the cover photo indicates that Mr. Powers' scope is broader.
Yet the end of the last sentence in his introduction throws this assumption into doubt: "...there is no substitute for visiting these buildings and getting to know them, inside and out." All architecture writers are aware that books are not a substitute for firsthand experience, but books do allow arguments to be made, attention to be levied on particular buildings, and comparisons to be made through their combination within the pages of a book. That said, the fact the Philips Pavilion is nowhere t...