Arts & Culture
Buildings and cities — the art form everyone is forced to live inside.
7 fields · 73 topics · 129 curated works
The discipline of making buildings.
Foundations & Overviews · Design Process · Space & Program · Form & Proportion · Light in Architecture
How building traditions developed.
Foundations & Overviews · Ancient Architecture · Classical Orders · Gothic Architecture · Renaissance Architecture
The twentieth-century break and its aftermath.
Foundations & Overviews · Modernism in Architecture · The Bauhaus · Le Corbusier · Mies van der Rohe
The scale above the building.
Foundations & Overviews · City Form & Morphology · Zoning · Street Design · Walkability
Buildings judged over their whole life.
Foundations & Overviews · Passive Design · Energy Efficient Buildings · Embodied Carbon · Green Building Standards
The immediate environment.
Foundations & Overviews · Interior Space Planning · Furniture Design · Lighting Design · Acoustic Design
The arguments about what architecture is for.
Foundations & Overviews · Form Follows Function · Pattern Language · Phenomenology of Place · Critical Regionalism
No prior grounding assumed.
The Stones of Venice
John Ruskin · 1851
Judges Gothic architecture morally superior to classical and Renaissance building because its rough, individually varied ornament lets the ordinary…
+27 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Ten Books on Architecture
Vitruvius · 25 BCE
Architecture must satisfy firmitas, utilitas and venustas together, structural strength, functional use and beauty, and the architect needs training…
+53 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
On the Art of Building in Ten Books
Leon Battista Alberti · 1485
Beauty in a building is concinnitas, a harmony of parts governed by fixed numerical proportion, so that nothing could be added or removed without…
+46 more at this level
12 of 129 works
John Ruskin
Judges Gothic architecture morally superior to classical and Renaissance building because its rough, individually varied ornament lets the ordinary worker's imperfection and freedom show, where a smooth, machine-precise facade demands enslaving the worker to an exact, repeated pattern.
Frederick Law Olmsted
Argues that large naturalistic parks are a public health necessity for industrial cities rather than an ornament, since only broad scenery can relieve the nervous strain of urban life that a small square cannot.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William Robinson
Argues for naturalising hardy exotic plants in rough, unmanicured settings rather than bedding them out in geometric Victorian patterns, founding the naturalistic planting style that later inspired ecological garden design.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Edward S. Morse
A detailed illustrated account of traditional Japanese domestic architecture and daily life within it, arguing its spatial flexibility and construction logic offered real lessons for Western designers.
Louis H. Sullivan
The tall buildings exterior should express its internal logic directly, because form ever follows function in every organic and man-made thing alike.
13 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Edith Wharton & Ogden Codman Jr.
Argues that a room's proportion and architectural structure, not its furnishings or drapery, are what make an interior beautiful, breaking with Victorian upholstered excess in favour of classical restraint.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ebenezer Howard
A new kind of town, capped in size and ringed by permanent farmland, can combine the economic pull of the city with the health of the countryside if the increase in land value is captured for the community rather than the landlord.
about 3 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyGertrude Jekyll
A garden should be composed like a painting, in deliberate drifts of colour and texture through the seasons, argued from the author's own working practice rather than from abstract design rules.
about 5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Frank Lloyd Wright
Argues the machine, properly used, can liberate ornament and craft from tedious hand labour and become the tool of a genuinely modern architecture, rather than architecture's enemy.
Adolf Loos
Argues that applying decoration to everyday objects and buildings is a sign of cultural backwardness, and that a modern, evolved culture expresses itself through unornamented form alone.
Gustav Stickley
Furniture and house should be designed together on the same honest, unornamented structural logic, since the American Arts and Crafts home is a single object of simple joinery, not a shell filled with imported style.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Elsie de Wolfe
Argues interior decoration should serve comfort, simplicity and the client's own character rather than following inherited period styles, written as a practical manual by America's first professional decorator.