Witold Rybczynski introduces his book with a telling anecdote. During the six years of his architectural education, 'the subject of comfort' was only mentioned once. He finds this 'a curious omission', since comfort should surely be central to architecture - like justice to law or health to medicine. The point is a strong one, and Professor Rybczynski duly piles it on. Bitterly deprived by his own education, he can only write from a position of 'ignorance'. As he sets out to discover the 'meaning of comfort', he is at pains to differentiate his own ecological approach from the high-rise proclamatory style, full of arrogant expertise and alienated technique, with which his profession still tries to hide the 'fundamental poverty' of its modern ideas. Here, then, is another architect going all human on us, eating humble pie and sending himself on a remedial course to find out what everyone else has always known.

LRB 2 June 1988 | PDF Download