In the middle of the last century, writers such as Nikolaus Pevsner tried to define the architecture of their epoch. It was about the inevitable progression to an architecture suitable to the machine age, which with the help of techniques such as reinforced concrete would tend towards an ever greater simplicity of form. This progression was called the modern movement, and it was led by a small number of masters – Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. If you liked your buildings a bit more organic and woody, the great Finn Alvar Aalto might also be admitted.
The movement's advance was marked out by a few canonical works, such as villas, exhibition pavilions and factories. And, when the inevitable reaction came, and postmodernists and traditionalists called for a return of decoration and historical styles, the distilled version of modern architecture promoted by Pevsner and others became a useful caricature.
The reality, needless to say, was more complicated, and now Phaidon have devoted several kilogrammes of book to putting the record straight. 20th-Century World Architecture is a coffee-table book that weighs more than a table, an epic production that boasts its scale: 3,800 photographs of 757 buildings by 699 architects in 97 countries.
It aims to set architecture in wider contexts of colonisation and decolonisation, and of cultural exchanges between countries. It is ordered geographically and, keen to challenge the Eurocentric tone of much architectural history, starts with Oceania and Asia, even if many of the projects show a strong European or North American influence.
Some surprises are thrown up, such as the late flowering art nouveau houses in Harbin, now in China, built for the Russian railway staff who were then part of the occupying force. More generally the atlas shows a richer world than the official histories allowed for, and of less certain direction. There are experiments, mishaps, eccentricities, glorious dead ends, and adventures undertaken with no concern for their place in the march of history. There are also things well done, without much rhetoric.
Thus a figure like Pancho Guedes, who practised a sort of baroque-expressionist-corbusianism in mid-century Mozambique, gets his due. There is the fine Central Market in Pnomh Penh, of 1937, a tiered, domed structure in reinforced concrete that is modernist and temple-like at once. There are surprises in Zagreb and Baghdad, the achievements of state-hired architects in communist countries, and space is given to some of the subtler modernists, including Coderch and De la Sota in Spain.
Although its range is impressive, and it is mostly hard to quibble with its choices, it cannot cover everything. It could arguably have had more work by traditionalists, such as Edwin Lutyens's Great War memorial at Thiepval. It does not include architects such as the Austrian Joseph Maria Olbrich, or the great Belgian genius of art nouveau, Victor Horta, all of whom made their names in the 19th century, but had plenty to offer the 20th. More importantly it suffers from some uncertainty of purpose – not a guide book, clearly, as it is almost too heavy to lift, but not quite an encyclopedia either.
For greater illumination you should turn to another Phaidon production, relatively svelte at 528 pages, published earlier this year. This is the work of the intelligent and erudite Jean-Louis Cohen, a man who comfortably enlists non-architectural writers such as the historian Fernand Braudel into his arguments. The book is called The Future of Architecture Since 1889 – the starting point being the year of the Paris Universal Exhibition, which gave the world the Eiffel Tower.
Cohen also weaves a richer fabric than earlier historians. His book engages with politics and events, and does not shirk the horrors of the century. It shows a plan of a concentration camp as well as desirable villas. It is visually rich (there must have been some heroic image research), including appropriate magazine covers and promotional posters, as well as the usual photographs and drawings of buildings.
It deserves, in short, to be the standard work on the subject from now on, its main weakness being a relative lack of interest in China. Taken together, Cohen's book and the Atlas would give you a firm base for understanding the architecture of the last century. Your bank account would take a hit, the price of the atlas alone being £125. If you choose only one, it should be Cohen's.
