A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form by Kenneth Frampton, edited by Ashley Simone
Lars Müller Publishers, 2015
Hardcover, 304 pages

Amazon's "Author Page" for Kenneth Frampton features, as of today, 66 books the prolific architectural historian has authored, edited or contributed to. I have a good chuck of those books, or at least of that number ? 14 as of today, when I found an issue of Architectural Design from 1982 by and about Kenneth Frampton and his then (and now) influential book, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, which was the first book of his I ever purchased. He is one of those writers whose books I have a hard time passing up. Even though his take on architectural history is consistent ? some might say rigid or even inflexible ? I like to read more of his books for the nuance of his arguments and for the new ways of (re)telling the same histories.
This new book from Lars Müller Publishers falls into the latter camp, in that it is a novel way of presenting the histories of 28 buildings from the 1920s to the middle of the last decade. Rather than treat each building individually, Frampton compares two buildings at a time, two buildings with similar typology, size, and date. These include Mies's Tugendhat House and Aalto's Villa Mairea, Hertzberger's Centraal Beheer and Foster's Willis Faber-Dumas, Terragni's Casa del Fascio and Asplund's Gothenburg Law Courts, and Rietveld's Schröder House and Le C...