Books : review : "Modern architecture : representation and reality"

Reviews "Modern architecture : representation and reality," by Neil Levine (Yale University Press, 2010). This book is a compilation of Neil Levine's Slade Lectures in Fine Art given at the University of Cambridge in the academic year 1994-95. It is to some extent a recasting of the received history of Euro-American architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries. Comprising eight chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion, this sub-titular opposition between reality and representation becomes qualified in the course of lectures by a number of other loaded terms, including: appearance, truth, abstraction, history, and imitation, all of which serve to articulate in different ways the discrimination between representation and reality in the evolution of modern architecture. [Revised Publication Abstract]