11.4.2004

The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture

Includes The Finnish embassy in Berlin, Germany.

810pp, Phaidon
A real atlas of what is being built in the world today would be a confounding thing – a Domesday Book of cheapness, pretension and making do. This vast Phaidon atlas is something different: a gazetteer of all that is most inventive, inspiring and humane in the architecture of the past five years. Itself beautifully and thoughtfully designed, it leaves one with a heady reassurance that architecture, so essential and ubiquitous, and often so banal, is still at its best a transforming medium, giving meaning as it gives delight.

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