The story of architecture in 100 buildings

One recent estimate claims there are 4.732 billion buildings on Earth, but it’s difficult to establish a credible methodology to count them. Is Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, created out of swaggering pride and ambition, in the same category as a shanty hut in an Algerian bidonville? Unless you live in a desert, buildings are unavoidable, making architecture not just a necessity for survival but the art form most pregnant with meaning.

When I was a boy I wanted to be an architect. Not because I was interested in drain schedules, load paths, wrangling with local authorities or designing kitchen extensions but because architecture seemed the most powerful expression of style. We know and judge cultures by their monuments, not their facility for credit default swaps. And the apex of any culture is expressed in history’s best buildings: New York in the mid-20th century, Victorian Britain, Medici Florence, and so on.

In my school days, the way to get a handle on all of this was an awful brick of a book by Banister Fletcher called A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method.