Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy (Writing Architecture)

Rating:
Summary: Physical Architecture comes of age, finally!
Review: This is a welcomed variant in the MIT series "Writing Architecture" whose other tomes are, for the most part, examples of postmodernistic self-emphatuated drivel! Fernandez-Galiano instead takes up the theme of Energy and Entropy in Architecture and he does so with considerable skill and rare insight. His choice of illustrations alone is worth the price of the book!
However his grasp of Physics and its History is quite sophomoric and hampered by his reliance on secondary, contentious and dubious sources, such as Morin, Rifkin and Georgescu-Roentgen. His recounting of Thermodynamics as an ideological contest between "mechanistic and organismic" schools mascarades the actual facts of this interesting history which he largely
mishandles (he should read Maxwell, Helmholtz, Gibbs and Planck instead. And Boltzmann too, of whom he only mentions the suicide)! Much of his references to the interesting ideas of Prigogine is also marginal at best! On the side of architecture proper he misses the very crucial appraisals by authors such as Mumford, Giedion, Tuan and Mitchell which cover much of his territory. Yet this is a book stll makes better reading than about anything on this subject, (mostly because there is so little written on this worthy subject)!