'Isms: Understanding Architectural Styles

Almost everyone would have an issue with one entry or other in here. But overall this is a nice little summary of the intellectual history of architecture with decent images and enough facts to get one started with more in-depth research. The icons are a bit silly, but it is well written. See also the similar volume on art movements, Isms: Understanding Art.

Here's a book that probably appears on few reading lists in architecture schools. I'm sure that it's too concise and too concrete to be liked by "serious" architectural historians and theoreticians. That said, I know that my own education in architecture would have been greatly enhanced had I found this earlier in my academic career. It's no replacement for the readings I have been assigned, for it doesn't provide anything on, say, modernism half as engaging as what we might get from Peter Eisenman or Colin Rowe. But Eisenman and Rowe don't exactly ease newcomers into the discourse. Jeremy Melvin (himself a perfectly capable historian) is willing to sacrifice depth in this book and lend his readers a helping hand. This book is a friendly little guidebook, no more, no less. Its hokey iconography is a little annoying, its colors a little garish, but the terse summarization of complicated ideas is admirable, and the book impressively accessible.