Bizarre Architecture
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What happens when architecture abandons convention and embraces the outrageous, the surreal, and the spectacularly strange? Bizarre Architecture by Charles Jencks answers that question with wit and intellectual precision, cataloguing a remarkable global survey of buildings that defy categorisation — structures that shock, confound, and ultimately fascinate through their sheer audacity of form. From grotesque commercial vernacular to wilfully eccentric civic monuments, Jencks presents a world where architects have pushed the boundaries of taste, function, and meaning to their outermost limits, creating buildings that are at once absurd and deeply revealing of the cultural anxieties of their age. Jencks, one of the most influential architectural critics of the twentieth century and the scholar who famously theorised Post-Modernism in architecture, brings his characteristic blend of semiotic rigour and irreverent humour to bear on this rich subject. Bizarre Architecture is not mere curiosity-hunting; it argues that strangeness in the built environment is a legitimate and telling form of cultural expression, a mirror held up to the societies that produced these structures. Illustrated with striking photography and underpinned by Jencks's sharp critical intelligence, the book leaves the reader with a provocative question: in a world of relentless architectural conformity, is it the bizarre that tells us the most truth?
Author: Charles Jencks
Format: Paperback
Genre: Architecture
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What happens when architecture abandons convention and embraces the outrageous, the surreal, and the spectacularly strange? Bizarre Architecture by Charles Jencks answers that question with wit and intellectual precision, cataloguing a remarkable global survey of buildings that defy categorisation — structures that shock, confound, and ultimately fascinate through their sheer audacity of form. From grotesque commercial vernacular to wilfully eccentric civic monuments, Jencks presents a world where architects have pushed the boundaries of taste, function, and meaning to their outermost limits, creating buildings that are at once absurd and deeply revealing of the cultural anxieties of their age. Jencks, one of the most influential architectural critics of the twentieth century and the scholar who famously theorised Post-Modernism in architecture, brings his characteristic blend of semiotic rigour and irreverent humour to bear on this rich subject. Bizarre Architecture is not mere curiosity-hunting; it argues that strangeness in the built environment is a legitimate and telling form of cultural expression, a mirror held up to the societies that produced these structures. Illustrated with striking photography and underpinned by Jencks's sharp critical intelligence, the book leaves the reader with a provocative question: in a world of relentless architectural conformity, is it the bizarre that tells us the most truth?