Great Architecture of the World [antikvár]

ifíl!'Forewordby Sir Nikolaus PevsnerThe first world history of architecture was published 254 years ago. It is Fischer von Erlach's Entwurff einer Historischen Architectur. Fischer von Erlach was Architect to the Emperor Charles VI. His book consists of large etchings, each with two or three lines of caption. The pictures include the Temple of Solomon, Egyptian Pyramids, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Parthenon in Athens, the Golden House of Nero, several Roman triumphal arches, the Castel Sant'Angelo, the Palace of Diocletian at Split, the Ruins of Palmyra, Stonehenge, three of the main mosques of Istanbul, the Imperial Palace of Peking and Fischer's own buildings: Schoenbrunn, the Palace of Prince Eugene, the church of St Charles in Vienna, and the Collegiate Church at Salzburg. The assortment is amazing, even though most of the distant buildings are free restorations (very free indeed), and even though all Romanesque, all Gothic and all Renaissance are missing.The present book is Fischer Redivivus with the gaps filled in, with serious texts instead of mere captions and with about 800 illustrations accurately presenting the buildings and accompanying photographic reproduction by drawings. In the latter feature in particular this book is not at all something usual in terms of today. Let me put before you the 2Dth-century possibilities of acquainting the layman with buildings. The best would of course be orally and in front of and inside the buildings themselves. Failing that, filming would do. But that also can be done only very rarely. So the accepted method is by printed word and printed illustrations. But in what proportion should they be to one another? There is no fixed answer to that question.If I was asked by the editors of the present volume toprovide an answer, the reason was no doubt that I have written a history of architecture myself. On the strength of that I would first of all say that text without pictures or pictures without text cannot be successful, nor can a short text or a few pictures. When in the war, in 1942, I published my own Outline of European Architecture it had a total of about 100 pages of text and 60 pictures on miserable wartime paper, and even when the book grew considerably, it yet remained short for what it wanted to be, that is a reading book, and not quite amply enough illustrated to be a picture book. The editors of this new book, when they apportioned texts and pictures, placed these questions to themselves completely afresh. For the text they assembled a team of authors, and for the illustrations they settled, as I have already said, for about 800. And what a team they succeeded in getting for the text, and what a variety of illustrations!The use of colour is a great asset. For much architecture can come fully to life only in colour, whether a building operates with only two or three natural colours of stone, like St iVlichael at Hildesheim or Vézelay or Castel del Monte or Inigo Jones's Banqueting House before the 19th-century restoration, or whether it operates with a mixture of stone and varied bricks like Butterfield's churches, or whether it has the stained glass of medieval windows or the mosaic of Early Christian and Early Medieval buildings.The other great asset is the many drawingsreconstructions, sections, plans, isometric and perspective cutaways. For only such drawings can convey the spatial character of buildings, and architecture of all agesI carmot say it often enoughis space first and foremost, and so everything in a book on architecture which leads to richer spatial experiences is to be warmly welcomed.U-Jic