Twenty-Five+ Buildings Every Architect Should Understand: Revised and Expanded Edition

by Simon Unwin

The underlying theme of Twenty-Five + Buildings Every Architect Should Understand is the relationship of architecture to the human being, how it frames our lives and orchestrates our experience; how it can help us make sense of the world and contribute to our sense of identity and place. Exploring these dimensions through a wide range of case studies that illustrate the rich diversity of twentieth- and twenty-first-century architecture, this book is essential reading for every architect. With the addition of numerous shorter analyses, this new edition covers an even greater range of architectural ideas, providing students and architects with further inspiration for exploration in their own design work. Architects live by ideas. But where do they come from? And how do they shape buildings? There is no one right way to do architecture. This book illustrates many. Its aim is to explore the rich diversity of architectural creativity by analysing a wide range of examples to extract the ideas behind them. Twenty-Five+ Buildings Every Architect Should Understand is a companion to Simon Unwin’s Analysing the Universal Language of Place-
Making (most recent edition, 2021), and part of the trilogy which also includes his Exercises in Learning to Think as an Architect (second edition, 2022). Together the three books offer an introduction to the workings of architecture providing for the three aspects of theory, examples and practice. Twenty-Five+ Buildings focusses on analysing examples using the methodology offered by Analysing Architecture , which operates primarily through the medium of drawing. An underlying theme of Twenty-Five+ Buildings Every Architect Should Understand is the relationship of architecture to the human being, how it frames our lives and orchestrates our experiences; how it can help us give form to the world and contributes to our senses of identity and place. Exploring these dimensions through case studies that illustrate the rich diversity of twentieth- and twenty-first-century architecture, this book is essential reading, and hopefully an inspiration, for every architect. In this new edition supplementary analysis and discussion has been added to each of the twenty-five case studies, drawing attention to their influences from and on other architects. A number of extra shorter analyses have been included too, following the practice of presenting extra small dishes interspersed among main courses in high-end restaurants. These additional short analyses account for the + sign after ‘Twenty-Five’ in the title of this edition, and double the number of buildings analysed to around fifty.

Genres: Architecture

326 pages, Hardcover

Published November 3, 2023

About the author

Simon Unwin is a freelance writer and lecturer based in Cardiff, UK. He is a registered architect but concentrates on writing about architecture and teaching architectural analysis and design. His publications include six books: Analysing Architecture (Routledge, London, 1997, 2003, 2009 and 2014); An Architecture Notebook: Wall (Routledge, 2000); Doorway (Routledge, 2007); Twenty-Five Buildings Every Architect Should Understand (Routledge, 2010 and 2015); Exercises in Architecture (Routledge, 2012); and The Ten Most Influential Buildings in History: Architecture's Archetypes (Routledge, 2016). These books are used in schools of architecture around the world. Analysing Architecture has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Arabic. Recently, Unwin has instigated a series of Analysing Architecture Notebooks, which currently include Metaphor (Routledge, 2019), Children as Place-Makers (Routledge, 2019), Curve (Routledge, 2019) and Shadow (Routledge, 2020).

Simon Unwin is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Dundee, Scotland, where he was Professor from 2004 to 2009. Previously he was Senior Lecturer at the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff University, Wales. He has lived in Australia as well as the UK and taught or lectured in Israel, the USA, China, Malaysia, India, Sweden, Turkey and at other schools of architecture in the UK and Europe.

Contact: info@simonunwin.com