The History of Architecture. From the Avant-Garde Towards the Present

What exactly gave rise to the phantasmagoric ­buildings of ­starchitects such as Zaha Hadid? How did inter­actions between artists and architects affect architectural production during the twentieth century? Which exhibitions and publications have had a lasting influence over the last century? This concise volume chronicles the move­ments and trends in architecture over the past 120 ­years. Written as a narrative but split into succinct sections, it makes for clear and compelling reading. In his pithy and personal style, the Rome-based critic and archi­tectural historian Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi explores the events and motivations that have driven the work of leading archi­tects from Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, to Rem Koolhaas and Kazuyo Sejima. With over 700 illustrations and a comprehensive list of practitioners, this insightful chronicle is both visually ­appealing and easy to navigate. It covers buildings from across the globe and details projects by contem­porary archi­tects, bringing readers fully up to date.

Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, born 1956 in Sicily, studied Architecture and subsequently special­ised in Urban Planning. He taught History of Contemporary Archi­tecture at the Sapienza University of Rome, and now teaches History of Contemporary Design at the Rome University of Fine Arts (RUFA). He is the president of the Italian Association of Architecture and Criticism. He writes for numerous magazines, including ­Domus, Monument, and the Architects Newspaper, and has guest edited two issues of Architectural Design (AD) dedi­cated to Italian architecture. His books have anti­cipated the debate on key themes and ­figures in contemporary architecture. Among them is Rem ­Koolhaas: Metropolitan Transparency (1997), which ­introduced the Dutch architect to Italy. In ­Hyper­Archi­tec­ture: Spaces in the Electronic Age (1998) he raised the question of the relationship between architecture and digital technologies.