The Experience of Architecture

An alternative history of global architecture, reaching from Ancient Greece to Scandinavian modernism, which demonstrates how the built environment affects our experience of the world

'The Experience of Architecture' aims to understand how everyday acts in space are influenced by architectural form, a concept that is vital for all architects to grasp if our buildings are to be anything more than a commercial or aesthetic enterprise.

This book will appeal not only to architects and designers engaged in the production of space, but also to a richer understanding of their place in the built world.

It considers how specific built elements and volumes, taken from a wide array of buildings and settings around the world, can sustain or deny our powers of decision. From the hand-carved stairs in Greek villages to free-floating catwalks, the elegant processional steps of Renaissance Italy to Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterly manipulation of form, the seemingly random placement of Japanese stepping stones to the staircase in Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, all provide very different experiences of stepping from one level to the next, and all affect our experience of that space.

Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of our daily interactions with architecture, looking at stairs, floors and paths, moving interior spaces, perception and perspective, transparency and the relationship between a building and its setting.

Henry Plummer teaches architectural history and design at the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois. He received his MArch from MIT, studied light-art with György Kepes and was a photographic apprentice to Minor White. He is the author of Nordic Light, also published by Thames & Hudson.