Influence
Prince Charles has written the Preface to this book, declaring Salingaros to be “an intriguing, perhaps historically important, new thinker”. Prince Charles’ detractors may be surprised to find that this book is not at all about Classical architecture. Like Prince Charles, Salingaros is a great admirer of Islamic architecture, and the design theory he presents is claimed to be equally valid for Classical, Islamic, or any other vernacular or traditional architecture. Salingaros’ book presents a very different view of architecture and design from the teaching texts used for courses in architecture schools during the past several decades. He criticizes present-day architectural education for continuing to rely uncritically on models that he argues lead automatically to non-adaptivity and unsustainability. If one can get beyond the natural reaction to such criticisms, then designers will find much useful material for a new approach to architectural education.
Anthropologists K. Sorvig and J. Quillien commented: “The spirit of Jacob Bronowski permeates the work of Nikos Salingaros. "A Theory of Architecture" takes us directly to the heart of difficult questions. Salingaros explores ways to clarify and formalize our understanding of aesthetic forms in the built environment, using mathematics, thermodynamics, Darwinism, complexity theory and cognitive sciences. He postulates that cross-cultural universals derived from scaling rules in nature govern human appreciation of architecture.”
Architect and educator Ashraf Salama observed: “This book is of great value to architectural educators. It helps them correct some of the misconceptions inherited in architectural education … Knowledge is usually presented to students in a retrospective way where abstract and symbolic generalizations used to describe research results do not convey the feel of the behavior of the phenomena they describe; the late Donald Schön emphasized this view in 1988 … Rather than giving students ready-made interpretations about the work of star architects, this book offers a deeper insight into the understanding of the true essence of architecture. This is a marvelous piece and I suggest it to architectural educators as an excellent textbook for theory courses introduced in both undergraduate and graduate programs of architecture worldwide.”
Individual chapters have been translated into several different languages.,,
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