Barnabas Calder

A good attempt at summing up the global history of architecture with reference to its use of energy. I've done Mark Zarzombek's global history of architecture course from MIT and enjoy this genre of writing and material, blending ancient history with aesthetics and design. This book is worth reading even for those who know the path it will tread more or less. Calder has a bit of a focus on Liverpool when he's illustrating architectural changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth century - as a case study - and I noticed that he teaches at Liverpool University so that makes sense. I have to admit I got a little bored after Corbusier and he repudiation of all ornament in the first decades of the twentieth century (interesting to hear that Calder thinks this modernism hangs over many architects to this day in a similar way in which classical vocabulary and style hung over architects for centuries after Greece and Rome were no more). The focus on the book is the energy required to create architecture in different societies at different times, and I found it admirable that Calder thinks we need to look, in our current age of climate emergency, to the examples of low energy agrarian societies like ancient Rome in a building for the future.… (lisätietoja)