In Detail: Building Skins -- Concepts, Layers, Materials. (Reviews - Detailed Analysis).

Edited by Christian Schittich. Basel: Birkhauser, 2001, SFr 88, Euro 58

Those who love the way buildings are put together are familiar with the German magazine Detail. This book is from the same stable.

'Skin' is treated in a broad way. It is regarded as the non-structural covering to a framed structure, but the authors have not restricted themselves to lightweight cladding. The frontispiece, for example, shows the stony gabions of Herzog & de Meuron's California winery.

The book starts with an introduction leading us through the history of the building skin, up to the thin glass curtain walling of the '60s which is now presumed to be energy wasteful and often boring. Post-modernism is dismissed in a paragraph. The post-post-modern response is seen to be two-fold. The first response is the skin designed to be a heat and power generator, or at the very least put together with green issues very much in mind. The second response is to attach applied decoration, as Herzog & de Meuron's printed concrete at Eberswalde or Francis Soler's Renaissance images superimposed on a glass facade in Paris. Personally I don't get much pleasure from the second group, but the book covers both approaches fairly, with worldwide examples.

Beautifully produced, the book is well illustrated and, best of all for architects, it has details drawn to a recognized scale. If I have a complaint it is that it falls between being a picture book and a technical treatise. The minimalism that makes the book so delightful graphically gets in the way of providing fuller information; so it is not possible to comprehend much of the construction, or to know how well buildings perform in energy terms. But it is encouraging to see so many fine buildings not seen published before.