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

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 Architecture: the Universal Language of Place-
Making (most recent edition, 2021), and part of the trilogy which also includes his Exercises in Architecture: 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 learning: 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.

Simon Unwin is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Dundee, Scotland. He has lived in Great Britain and Australia, and taught or lectured on his work in China, Israel, India, Sweden, Turkey and the United States. Analysing Architecture’s international relevance is indicated by its translation into various languages and its adoption for architecture courses around the world. Now retired, Simon Unwin continues to teach at The Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff, UK.