Intentions in Architecture

"The book is the first serious attempt to outline a systematic and complete framework for the description of architecture. In 1911 Lethaby wrote that 'Modern builders need a classification of architectural factors irrespective of time and by essential variation. Some day we shall get a morphology of the art by some Linneaus or Darwin who shall start from the simplest cell and relate it to the most complex structures.' I claim that this book is that 'true classification.' Its mode, bred in the school of analytical philosophy, is unique for its precision of language and 'structural' method in a field long since abandoned to rhetoric and recipe... I have called the method of this book 'structural' to convey the manner in which the argument is built up by similar kinds of 'joint' throughout the whole framework. This is the mark of an authority. But what is remarkable is the extraordinary breadth of interest over which the authority is maintained. Colin St. John Wilson RIBA Journal "The book's erudition and thoroughness are consistent with the scholarship of [Schulz's] Swiss forbears-Giedion, Woelfflin, and Burkhardt. Since it is founded on modern science and the doctrine of symbolic form, it builds a place for architecture in a modern philosophical landscape. Its scope is thus even wider than that of Giedion's work." Nathan Silver Progressive Architecture