Skin deep.

MODERN CONSTRUCTION FACADES

By Andrew Watts. Vienna: Springer, 2005. [euro]69

How do you publish construction details that appeal to critical practitioners, inexperienced students, a wide range of anoraks as well as designers who are simply above the tiring practicalities of when is a bridge cold?

There have been a number of books which have achieved this over the past few years--Edward Ford's outstanding two-volume set The Details of Modern Architecture (AR March 1991) published by MIT Press immediately comes to mind; Phaidon's Architecture in Detail series has also been particularly successful in setting the detail in the context of the architecture. Modern Construction Facades, a technical study of some 40 building facades, can also take its place in this pantheon of technical volumes.

The book's hundreds of crisp line drawings sit on the pages in a clear and effortless way, setting impressive standards for the presentation of complex technical details.

The facades are divided into six sensible groups: glass, metal, masonry, concrete, plastic and timber. This straightforward organisation makes it easy to look things up, cross-reference and navigate one's way through the book. On every page the technical drawings are animated with colour photographs showing the completed building. Yasmin Watts, the graphic designer and herself an architect, must be commended for her clear and poetic layout.

Where on-site construction photographs are published in this work they help to illustrate a process, as in the six-page spread solely devoted to the in-situ concrete construction of Zaha Hadid's remarkable CAC Museum in Cincinnati, USA.

The seemingly straightforward metal sheet facade of Daniel Libeskind's War Museum in Manchester, and the ingenuity of Toyo Ito's clamped glass facade for the Sendai Mediatheque in Japan (AR October 2001), are both revelations. And Renzo Piano's Hermes Building in Tokyo (AR September 2001) constructed entirely of glass blocks appears surprisingly reminiscent of Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre. My personal favourites are the pared down steel details of Manuel de las Casas' Cultural Centre in Zamora, Spain and the similarly reduced limestone cladding details of Rafael Moneo's City Hall in Murcia, Spain (AR July 1999)--one of the great masterpieces of modern architecture.

This lovely book is perhaps worth purchasing just for its fascinating insight into the simple but effective construction of Shigeru Ban's 'plastic' house in Kawagoe, Japan (AR October 2001).

Other striking projects include Ove Arup's Hongkong Railway Station and work by the Portuguese architects Joao Alvaro Rocha & Jose Manuel Gigante.

The author Andrew Watts picks up on the annotations to the drawings and delivers a dense and distilled text, packed with solid technical information.

The rigour of the text will no doubt be instructive for students while the more advanced reader can glean enough information from the brilliant technical drawings without referring too much to the text. In its genre, MCF certainly stands out for being an attractive and useful book, and may I say, I highly recommend it.