Featured Author - Simon Unwin, Twenty Buildings Every Architect Should Understand

What has been your biggest inspiration for writing the new edition of Analysing Architecture?

I was glad to have the opportunity to produce a third edition of Analysing Architecture because it gave me a chance to include, amongst other things, a new section on `How Analysis Helps Design'. I first wrote Analysing to help student architects understand what is possible in architecture, but now in this new edition I have been more explicit about the ways in which design benefits from studying the work of other architects.

What is the underlying message you want the reader to take away with them after reading Analysing Architecture?

That architecture is a much richer field of human creativity than is sometimes suggested in the media. Architecture is as fundamental to our lives as language and history since it sets the spatial frames within which we do just about everything we do.

What would be the one “top tip” you would give a budding architect just starting out in their career?

I'll offer two. First, in your design work, try to access that innate capacity for place-making that you showed when you made dens and built tree houses as a child. And second, don't worry about `borrowing' ideas from other architects; all the greats do it.

Who do you find inspirational?

That's difficult… but I do get a lot of inspiration from literature. Some writers - I'm thinking of people like Charles Dickens or Gabriel Garcia Marquez - are very subtle about the ways in which they describe places and use them as active ingredients in their stories. They remind us that architecture is a narrative and emotional art as well as a visual one.

Name your five favorite buildings in the world and briefly explain why

That's difficult too… but I am fond of:

• LLainfadyn, a small slate-worker's cottage from North Wales, re-erected at the Folk Museum at St Fagans outside Cardiff, and included as a Case Study at the back of Analysing Architecture. I like it because of its simplicity.
• St Peter's Church in Klippan, Sweden, by Sigurd Lewerentz, because I found visiting it for the first time a profoundly emotional experience.
• The Thermal Baths at Vals, Switzerland, by Peter Zumthor, because it reminds me that architecture can appeal to all the senses, not just the eyes.
• Plas Brondanw in North Wales, by Clough Williams-Ellis, because it shows an architect, in the freedom of his own garden, experimenting with ideas.
• A tiny mud and thatch house in Kerala, India (illustrated on page 106 of the new edition of Analysing Architecture) because it is such a direct response to climate and to life.

DID YOU KNOW … ? - one unknown fact you don't know about the author

I failed my first year in architecture school! This is possibly one of the best things that ever happened to me because Analysing Architecture could be said to have emerged from my continuing attempts to understand why!
 

Other books by Simon Unwin include: