Critics' choice

Architectural Review, The, June, 2005 by Timothy Brittain-Catlin

10 X 10_2

London and New York: Phaidon. [pounds sterling]45

In December 2000 I wrote here that 'scarcely anyone will buy' Phaidon's first 10 X 10, an expensive, heavyweight, glossy compilation of 100 recent projects chosen by 10 critics, and I have to admit that I was wrong. That first volume has now appeared in paperback and has been translated into French and German, and those buying it have been, apparently, mainly nonarchitects; furthermore, its success encouraged Phaidon to bring out their stupendous Atlas of Contemporary World Archilecture, which will eventually prove invaluable to architectural historians. What the publishers have thus twice demonstrated is that lively and professional presentation of contemporary architecture can be as appealing to a broad audience as are other, more easily digested, branches of design. This second volume is a great deal better than the first. For one thing, the designer, Julia Hasting, has abandoned her irritatingly tiny vertical captions to the photographs and sobered up the format so that the great photographic displays, four pages per architect, are more easily legible. But more significantly, the anonymous editors have chosen a happier band of critics; it is interesting to note that one of these, Deyan Sudjic, was himself critical of the original volume, and both he and Alberto Campo Baeza seem to have taken the approach of choosing a broad range of work and explaining it clearly to a lay audience. This generosity pays off, for in general the work shown is of higher quality, too: much will be familiar to readers of the AR, and quite a lot testifies to the international appeal of the blobby stuff done at the AA at the moment, but there is also evidence that young architects everywhere--I estimate the average age here at around 45--are finally developing a coherent new language for good ordinary buildings, the one goal that has too often eluded Modernism since the 1970s.