Book reviews: Lavish tomes offer insight into architects' work

Ando, Complete Works 1975-2014

Piano, Complete Works 1966-2014

edited by Philip Jodidio
Taschen
 

Compendious, meticulously researched, lavishly produced and beautifully realised, these two books showcasing the works of two of architecture's contemporary superstars, Japan's Tadao Ando and Italy's Renzo Piano, are everything you'd expect from boutique publisher Taschen.

From the elegance of the design to the quality of the photographic reproduction to the intelligence behind the editing, they have been thought through as impressively as they have been executed.

You pity poor editor Philip Jodidio, though. At 720 and 648 pages respectively, these large-format hardbacks are quite preposterously packed with detail. At the start of each is a short essay on the architect in three languages (all European), and then it's straight into a compendious visual and textual document of an enormous number of projects each architect has undertaken, plus quite a few unrealised ones.

Each building gets everything from a spread to several dozen pages of lavishly produced photographs from every possible angle, with detailed captions, together with a short essay about each building, again in three languages, as well as plans, diagrams and architectural sketches and drawings. The perspective drawings can be particularly illuminating and strangely beautiful, juxtaposed with the reality they depict.

There's also an appendix featuring each architect's completed projects: plus, with Ando, design competition entries and detailed biographical information; and, with Piano, lists of works in progress and collaborators. It is the purest building porn, dangerously arousing material for the hardcore architecture geek, but the sheer beauty of the buildings and the photography means it isn't inaccessible to the rest of us.