Ten Architects

This book is about architects.

The architects featured in this book are diverse and very different from each other. For example, one of them is a mysterious architect; his architecture is associated with the mysterious structure of Solomon's Temple and extends to El Escorial, which is half palace, half monastery.

Another, while writing an architectural book called "Building Knowledge," also penned a screenplay called "The Overshoes of Fate." This text discusses the negative aspects of the personalities, belligerence, arrogance, disloyalty, extravagance, stubbornness, etc., of two of the most prominent architects among the founders of Modernism. Some of the architects we have focused on have not, and could not, accept architectural works that are products of cultures outside their own cultural values.

In fact, another architect, originally a scientist, an astronomer, who built St. Paul's Cathedral, one of London's most important structures, is also featured. Among the architects in this book, mention is also made of an architect who could not reconcile with the characteristics of his era and therefore fell out of favor. Some of the ten architects we chose are also concerned only with architecture, with architecture "itself," that is, with the design and implementation of buildings, with Vitruvius's three principles, with modernism, with "real architecture." The number of such architects is, of course, not limited to "ten." I can say that Vitruvius's De architectura libri decem (Ten Books on Architecture), the only architectural theoretical work remaining from Antiquity, had a distant, albeit influential, effect on limiting the number of architects mentioned in this book to "ten"...