Architecture in Context is a series of seven books by Christopher Tadgell describing and illustrating all the seminal traditions from man’s early settlements in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys to the technologically complex and stylistically sophisticated buildings of the second half of the twentieth century. In a synthesis of extraordinary range, it brings together the fruits of a lifetime of teaching and travelling the world, seeing and photographing buildings. Each stand-alone volume sets the buildings described and illustrated within their political, technological, social and cultural contexts, exploring architecture not only as the development of form but as an expression of the civilization within which it evolved.
The series focuses on the story of the Classical tradition from its origins in Mesopotamia and Egypt, through its realization in ancient Greece and Rome, to the Renaissance, Neo-Classicism, Eclecticism and Modernism. This thread is supplemented with excursions to cover the development of architecture in Central America, India, South-East Asia, and the Islamic world.
For students of architecture and art history, for travellers and for readers who want to understand the genesis of the buildings they see around them, each volume provides a complete, readable and superbly illustrated reference.
By Christopher Tadgell
August 04, 2017
This is the first in a series of seven books that describe and illustrate the seminal architectural traditions of the world. It describes the origins of the Classical tradition in the mountain temples of Sumer, the pyramids of Egypt and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. The story continues with the ...
By Christopher Tadgell
August 10, 2017
Architecture in Context is a series of seven books describing and illustrating all the seminal traditions of architecture from the earliest settlements in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys to the stylistically and technologically sophisticated buildings of the second half of the twentieth century. ...
By Christopher Tadgell
August 04, 2017
The Prophet Muhammad – acknowledged by his followers to have been the hand with which God wrote his definitive Word enshrined in the Koran – was born into the Quraishi tribe at Mecca c. 570 and died in Medina in 632. The great religion founded on that Word, which first claimed the submission (Islam...
By Christopher Tadgell
August 04, 2017
Unprecedented in scope, this fifth volume in the Architecture in Context series traces the rediscovery of Classical ideas and the emergence of the great artists and architects of late 15th- and early 16th-century Italy that led to the cultural peak characterized as the High Renaissance. It begins ...
By Christopher Tadgell
August 04, 2017
The East, the second in a series of seven books that describe and illustrate the seminal architectural traditions of the world, is a survey of unparalleled range and depth. The journey starts on the Indian subcontinent with the Vedic and native traditions of the 2nd millennium BCE, modified by the ...
By Christopher Tadgell
August 04, 2017
This volume tells the story of European architecture in the ‘middle ages’ – from the destruction by northern barbarians of Rome and the urban society it had fostered to the rediscovery of Classical values and the rebirth of humanism in 15th-century Italy. This period saw the evolution of feudalism,...
By Christopher Tadgell
August 04, 2017
Unprecedented in scope – like its companion volume on the High Renaissance, Mannerism – this sixth volume in the Architecture in Context series traces the development of architecture and decoration in the 17th and early 18th centuries – particularly the transformation of rationalist Classical ...
By Christopher Tadgell
August 01, 2017
The seventh book in the Architecture in Context series, this is a comprehensive survey of the European tradition of architecture from the pre-dawn of the Enlightenment in early Georgian England to the triumph of Brutalism in the seventh decade of the twentieth century. The three main sections are ...