Six famous buildings drawn as simple elevations, and a few ways to read any building you meet.
Line drawings, not to scale.
A portico of columns opens into a great domed rotunda. The dome is unreinforced concrete and is still the largest of its kind. An opening at the top lets in a slow, moving disc of light.
Best: Look up at middayJørn Utzon won the 1957 competition with a design of overlapping white shells on a stone platform at the water’s edge. The shells are covered in more than a million tiles.
Best: From a ferry at duskA white marble tomb built for Mumtaz Mahal by Shah Jahan. Strict symmetry, a great dome, four minarets and a long reflecting pool make it one of the most balanced buildings ever drawn.
Best: First light, when the marble turns roseAntoni Gaudí’s basilica grows like a forest of stone, with towers that taper to spires and columns that branch like trees. Construction continues today.
Best: Afternoon, when stained glass fills the naveLe Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret raised a white box on slim columns, with a long ribbon window and a roof garden. It shows his five points of a new architecture.
Best: Walk the ramp to the roofWilliam Van Alen crowned an Art Deco tower with a stainless-steel crown of stacked sunburst arches. It briefly held the title of tallest building in the world.
Best: Dusk, when the crown catches the last lightFive things to notice before you read the plaque.
Compare width, height and the size of openings. Buildings that please usually repeat a few ratios.
See where light enters and what it falls on. Great rooms are designed from the light inward.
Stone, brick, timber and metal show how a building was made. Honest materials age well.
Repeating bays, columns and windows set a beat. A break in the beat marks what matters most.
Entrances prepare you. A pause before a view makes the view feel larger.
Six families of style and how to spot them.
Columns, pediments and strict proportion. The orders of architecture (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) set a vocabulary that Europe and the Americas kept borrowing for two thousand years.