Beautiful Architecture

Principles, Properties, and Structures

Late in this book’s review process, one of the reviewers asked us to provide our personal opinion, in the form of commentary, on what a reader could learn from each chapter. The idea was intriguing, but we did not like the fact that we would have to second-guess the chapter authors. Asking the authors themselves to provide a meta-analysis of their writings would lead to a Babel tower of definitions, terms, and architectural constructs guaranteed to confuse readers. What was needed was a common vocabulary of architectural terms; thankfully, we realized we already had that in our hands.

In the Foreword, Stephen Mellor discusses seven principles upon which all beautiful architectures are based. In Chapter 1, John Klein and David Weiss present four architecture building blocks and six properties that beautiful architectures exhibit. A careful reader will notice that Mellor’s principles and Klein’s and Weiss’s properties are not independent of each other. In fact, they mostly coincide; this happens because great minds think alike. All three, being very experienced architects, have seen many times in action the importance of the concepts they describe.

We merged Mellor’s architectural principles with the definitions of Klein and Weiss into two lists: one containing principles and properties (Table 1), and one containing structures (Table 2). We then asked the chapter authors to mark the terms they thought applied to their chapters, and produced a corresponding ...