How Architecture Works

The prize-winning scholar's “expert, holistic, down-to-earth guide” to the beauty and function of architecture (Booklist, starred review).

We spend most of our days and nights in buildings. They are the setting of our everyday lives as well as a public art form. Yet architecture remains a mystery to most of us. In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski, a renowned critic and winner of the Vincent Scully Prize for his architectural writing, answers our most fundamental questions about how good and not-so-good buildings are designed and constructed.

Introducing the reader to the rich and varied world of modern architecture, Rybczynski reveals how architects as varied as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, and Robert A. M. Stern envision and create their designs. He teaches us how to “read” plans, how buildings respond to their settings, and how the smallest detail of a stair balustrade can convey an architect’s vision.

Ranging widely from a war memorial in London to an opera house in St. Petersburg, from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., to a famous architect’s private retreat in downtown Princeton, How Architecture Works explains the central elements that make up good building design. “Architecture, if it is any good, speaks to all of us,” Rybczynski writes. This revelatory book is his grand tour of architecture today.