| | Great Buildings Of the World. Time Inc.
Subtitled, "The World's Most
Influential, Inspiring And Astonishing Structures,"
this special issue of Time capitalizes on the popularity
of architecture since Frank Gehry's Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbao, Spain. In addition to featuring portfolios
of Gehry and his contemporaries Santiago Calatrava and Norman
Foster, the $11, 170-ad-free-page special is also a decent
primer on architectural history, from the Pyramids to the
present. Breaking buildings down into easily digestible
categories - Where We Worship, Where We Live, Where We Work,
etc. - each chapter traces the evolution of structures by
building type by highlighting important buildings in different
eras.The wide range of building styles is refreshing, with
obvious pieces of architecture like the Taj Mahal, Sydney
Opera House and the Getty
Center included with less-obvious gems like Tibet's
Potala
Palace, the Victor Horta
Museum, and Canada's The
Ice Hotel. With plenty of color photographs and short
texts that tends to focus on the stories behind the buildings
over the formal aspects of the architecture, this special
issue (on newsstands until November 8, 2004) makes a good
coffee table book for every armchair architect.
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