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Rating: 
Summary: Formalist Garbage
Review: As a first-year student, I didn't know a thing about building analysis. This book taught me. It has dozens of diagrams, covering dozens of buildings. It took me from looking at facades to looking at (and understanding) geometry, proportion and the components that make up the building as a whole. Basically, it changed the way I see architecture.
Rating: 
Summary: the bible of building analysis
Review: As a first-year student, I didn't know a thing about building analysis. This book taught me. It has dozens of diagrams, covering dozens of buildings. It took me from looking at facades to looking at (and understanding) geometry, proportion and the components that make up the building as a whole. Basically, it changed the way I see architecture.
Rating:
Summary: Very good for nontechnical people!
Review: As an interior design major who isn't wild about the technical part of the field, I have found this book both informative and easy to read. My classmates agree!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent! Disregard the sour grapes below
Review: Pertaining to another snide review... The point of masterworks is that they allow and reward reinterpretation and new readings over time. Rediscovery and renewal are why the buildings remain important. This book offers diagrammatic re-readings which may or may not jibe with the architects professed goals, but that's it value. When interrogating classic buildings, there are absolutely valid reasons at a certain point to say "Let's now disregard the architects intentions for the time being." Turning to any architects extremely manipulative, apocryphal histories is fraught with it's own perils, because their job requires them to wear so many hats; huckster, self-promoter, white-liar... etc. "Truth" - whatever that is - becomes the casualty.If you are in architecture school, this book is a godsend towards formulating points of departure (!) for your own work, not towards getting down to the generative origins of canonical works. Do we really need another book consisting only of official stories already heavily documented eleswhere? This book is thankfully nothing of the sort, and that's why it is invaluable as a REFERENCE BOOK.
Rating:
Summary: Quite a stretch
Review: The works that best qualify for this type of investigation is clearly Post Modernist stuff. Seeking this analysis in Modern Architecture like that of Mies is quite a stretch. Surely not for use in contemporary Architectural climate. Thankfully it does not attempt next to dissect Ghery!!!! Buildings werent built like this!
Rating:
Summary: Give it a chance
Review: This book does a great job at distilling essential qualities
of architecture through the analysis of exemplary projects.
It would be an ideal book for any student of architecture.
The "reader" from Princeton is a little demented if he or
she thinks that "geometrical nonsense" wasn't in the mind
of Wright at Fallingwater. I would challenge them to show
me a project of Wright's that is not full of such
"nonsense." Keep trying though, and the next time you feel
like saying something stupid, don't write it down...
Rating:
Summary: Give it a chance
Review: This book does a great job at distilling essential qualities
of architecture through the analysis of exemplary projects.
It would be an ideal book for any student of architecture.
The "reader" from Princeton is a little demented if he or
she thinks that "geometrical nonsense" wasn't in the mind
of Wright at Fallingwater. I would challenge them to show
me a project of Wright's that is not full of such
"nonsense." Keep trying though, and the next time you feel
like saying something stupid, don't write it down...
Rating:
Summary: Formalist Garbage
Review: This is the only way to describe the diagramming efforts that have been shown here. It is almost ridiculous to see the attempt to find the golden rectangle in almost every building. Believe me geometrical nonsense as well as the "parti" was no where in the mind of FLW for Fallingwater. Similarly the critical agenda as well as the main "idea" of the building is a whole lot richer and important than seeing symmetry and axes. My million $$ question is how does the participant in any space percieve that axis shown when he is more immersed in the feeling of the architecture? I guess that this mumbo-jumbo stopped at Venturi as I havent seen any "analysis" (save critical and existential) of Holl, or HDM or Ito or Koolhaas or Eisenmann or anyone of the Avant Garde. Stay away from this book if you want to learn anything about architecture.
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