The book is not a typical guidebook, nor a generic history tale and not even a disguised autobiography. It is a listing of select pairs of buildings that each articulates a formal and abstract concept that is part of the culture of architecture, spelled with a capital a. The main idea of the book is to hide the bitter pill of academic formal analysis in a dollop of sugary personal anecdotes and humor. Hopefully, this will be creating unexpected juxtapositions that might elicit shock and new perceptions, canceling the sleepy accepted dogma we all live under. The essays will be paring the famous and the infamous, the profound and the absurd, the beloved and the forgotten, the monstrous and the miniscule.
The book is not a typical guidebook, nor a generic history tale and not even a disguised autobiography. It is a listing of select pairs of buildings that each articulates a formal and abstract concept that is part of the culture of architecture, spelled with a capital a. The main idea of the book is to hide the bitter pill of academic formal analysis in a dollop of sugary personal anecdotes and humor. Hopefully, this will be creating unexpected juxtapositions that might elicit shock and new perceptions, canceling the sleepy accepted dogma we all live under. The essays will be paring the famous and the infamous, the profound and the absurd, the beloved and the forgotten, the monstrous and the miniscule.