Details of Modern Architecture

How did the great architects of this century reconcile their vision of architecturewith the realities of building? This is a crucial question that every student of architecture mustconfront. The Details of Modern Architecture, the first comprehensive analysis of both the technicaland the aesthetic importance of details in the development of architecture, provides not one answerbut many.The more than 500 illustrations are a major contribution in their own right. Providing avaluable collective resource, they present the details of notable architectural works drawn insimilar styles and formats, allowing comparisons between works of different scales, periods, andstyles.Covering the period 1890-1932, Ford focuses on various recognized masters, explaining thedetailing and construction techniques that distort, camouflage, or enhance a building. He looks atthe source of each architect's ideas, the translation of those ideas into practice, and the successor failure of the technical execution.Ford examines Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House andFallingwater Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, and buildings by McKim, Mead & White, Lutyens, Miesvan der Rohe, and Schindler from a point of view that acknowledges the importance of tradition,precedent, style, and ideology in architectural construction. He discusses critical details from atechnical and contextual standpoint, considering how they perform how they add to or detract fromthe building as a whole, and how some have persisted and been adapted through time.

Edward R. Ford is a practicing architect in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia.