WORDS AND BUILDINGS: A VOCABULARY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE.

By Adrian Forty. London: Thames & Hudson. 2000. [pounds]28

The model for this book, which is acknowledged in the subtitle, is Raymond Williams' twenty-five-year-old classic Keywords -- A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. A vocabulary, notice, not a dictionary or a glossary. In this architectural version, there are only 18 'entries' and most of them are substantial essays, tracing the careers of words like Character, Function, Structure and Type over the decades and sometimes centuries since they were first pressed into the service of architecture. What emerges is an unusually clear and accessible history of modern architectural theory. Students of all kinds will love this book, if only because its alphabetical arrangement removes any obligation to read it from cover to cover. In fact if it is read from cover to cover it becomes rather repetitive as most of the major theoretical texts and a few minor ones are revisited in each entry. But this must be seen as a positive feature, helping to knit the entries together through comparison and cross reference.

Forty has some favourite sources -- Gottfried Semper, John Ruskin, Louis Sullivan, Aldo Rossi -- but for the most part he maintains a puritanical objectivity and unshakeable scepticism. He skilfully enumerates and place historically all the possible shades of meaning of each of his chosen words but what he is really interested in are the hidden political and ideological motives behind their use. He is alert, for example, to the gender bias of architectural discourse, pointing out that a seemingly neutral work like Form actually represents a masculine ideal. He can be ruthless, too. At the end of several thousand words of copiously referenced exegesis, Form is finally dismissed as 'a concept that has outlived its usefulness'.

There is no doubting the intelligence and scholarship of this book. My only quarrel is with its divided structure. The alphabetical entries are preceded by six thematic essays but the arrangement hardly seems justified. The essays on language metaphors and scientific metaphors, for example, could surely, without much alteration, have been included in the main vocabulary headed simply Language and Science. And there are some curious omissions. Where are Environment, Historicism, Organic, Rational? Where, for that matter, are Modern and Architecture?