Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide

Love this book and all the architectural styles of the world through the years.

excellent reference for students, professionals or casual historians

Beautiful pictures and interesting storyline

The book includes short description of each style through history with gorgeous hand sketched drawings and their explanations. Unfortunately some of the important styles or sub styles are skipped.

This is a beautifully written and illustrated book!

I love this book it’s very easy to understand and learn from

Not as comprehensive as I would like. Has illustrations of major movements but not off-shoots. Does a decent job.

I got this since it was promoted as a worldwide review of architectural styles but it does what those old-fashioned art history books do. It has a few pages on ancient Mesopotamia, a couple pages on ancient Egypt, a couple pages on pre-modern China, a couple pages on pre-modern Japan, a few pages on pre-modern India, a few pages on pre-modern India, and then the vast majority of the book is Euro-American styles. The non-Eurocentric chapters almost completely ignore residential architecture in favor of temples. Africa, Indochina, and the Pacific are ignored entirely.My second beef with the book is that a lot of the key features they list for styles can't really help you discern the styles in real life. For the chapter on Ancient Egypt, they list "massive constructions" & "monumental structures", terms that are also used for other styles, making it a not really useful tool for discerning this style from any other. You can make a massive construction in any style if you want to. Next, they list the materials used, such as "mud, brick, limestone, sandstone, granite" and "relief sculpture". Well, once again, I could use these materials to construct a building in almost any style, and I could add relief sculpture in almost any style.Then they say "post-and-lintel construction" and "load-bearing construction". These are a little better since they at least separate it from some modern styles, but still not a lot of differentiation from other pre-modern styles. Which just leaves us with "hieroglyphics" as the one identifying marker to set Ancient Egyptian apart from everything else. You can't argue that they're implying that all the features are needed to make it Ancient Egyptian since there are plenty of non-ceremonial Ancient Egyptian buildings which did not have relief sculpture or hieroglyphics. And there were later Egyptian Revival styles which did have hieroglyphics, but which were not massive and did not use load-bearing construction. Yet the most uneducated layperson would still instantly recognize these as Egyptian-inspired.On the plus side, the pen-and-ink drawings are pretty and make this a nice coffee-table book to flip through and read casually.