Some books are usefully filled with facts and can be consulted when one needs information. They can properly sit on the library shelf and be taken down when the need arises. There are other books that go about their business in a different way, and by taking a hold on our imagination they leave us changed by our encounter with them.
Spiro Kostof (1936–91) was attracted to drama, and saw buildings as the settings in which we perform our rituals, public and private. When A History of Architecture was published in 1985, this side of his approach was prominently signaled in his subtitle, Settings and Rituals. The book has been around for so long now that it is difficult to imagine architectural history without it. It joined the bookshelf alongside the dictionary-like Banister Fletcher, which had its origins in a text and drawings by the architect Sir Banister Fletcher,...
University of California Press