There are books about architecture: histories, polemics, stylistic parades. And there are books about architects - although good ones are few and far between unless architecture is leavened with moral turmoil (Speer) or given fictive help (Hawksmoor). But the genre of architectural publishing that really flourishes is not stories of the lives or ideas of individual architects, but books of pictures of their buildings.
It was Le Corbusier who started the trouble, as usual. His Oeuvre Complete, eight landscape-format, canvas-bound volumes with the word "Corbusier" simply stencilled across the cover to a design by Max Bill, are holy books for generations of architects. It was ostensibly a project got up by others. "That a publisher and two young architects should have joined forces to make this book a sort of balance-sheet of my work is naturally gratifying to me as a proof of the younger generation's sympathy for it," the great Swiss wrote in the introduction to the first edition.
It is no balance-sheet, of course. There is no debit column. There is merely page after page of perfectly realised projects or, if not, at least of well-made models and pretty drawings. Following Le Corbusier's model, today's oeuvres are the prerogative of architects not only of a certain pretension, but also of a certain self-declaring progressivist mien. There are already multi-volume sets from Norman Foster (four volumes so far), Renzo Piano (three) and Nicholas Grimshaw (two). There are no comparable catalogues of the output of postmodernists such as James Stirling or Terry Farrell. This week sees the publication of the first in a set from Foster's and Piano's old partner, Richard Rogers. It includes the Pompidou Centre and the Lloyd's Building, but the Millennium Dome has been left for a later volume.
What are we to make of these books? They are not manifestos. They are not records of paper architecture produced by visionaries unable to find patronage. They are not quite art catalogues - for the most part, art is still allowed to speak for itself. These have short, flatly descriptive texts. The recurring tale is of formulae applied, problems solved, needs met, clients sent away happy.
Sometimes a plan or an elevation lends a technical gloss, but it is the almost pornographic photographs that matter most, each one carefully timed and styled so that the sky is blue and the beds are planted and no person happens to be strolling through the frame. It's almost as if they expect you to go and build what you see. In one way, these books are the successors to Vitruvius and Serlio and Palladio, authors of volumes that passed on timeless and nameless classical ideals. But this is to reckon without the contemporary cult of the hero creator.
It was Rogers' book jacket that held the answer. Hadn't I seen that name set in almost the same typeface somewhere else? I had. The words "Ruth Rogers" appear on the cover of the River Cafe cookbooks in an almost identical typeface. These are the recipe books of the visual arts. They sell to architectural students who, with a few ill-advised variations of their own, will reproduce the designs within to generally diminished effect or, more likely, as the rest of us do with recipe books, merely ogle the pictures and wish they could do the same as they labour at their computer screens towards their next piece of beans-on-toast architecture.
For food is likewise discussed without literary effect or, strangely, even much relish, while photographs show idealised versions of the dishes, styled and dehumanised. Nobody eats in a cookbook, just as nobody shelters in an architecture book. And now that most of the publishing chefs are on to their second or third books, the tendency of the genre to multiple volumes comes into play as well.
There are some differences. Cookbooks are made to be read for a start. In architects' catalogues the words, generally produced these days by some hired pen (Le Corbusier at least wrote his own commentaries), are unimportant, their unimportance signalled by the way they are typeset. Rogers uses an ideologically sound light Helvetica typeface in a size too small and across columns too wide to encourage reading.
Foster's oeuvre complete is an exception. With three more volumes in the pipeline, Le Corbusier is clearly the target to beat. It is a serious undertaking, closely art-directed by its subject. Foster has even taken on Phaidon's former editor of such projects in order to keep the presses cranking. So far as I know, there is as yet no Norman Foster cookbook. But if there were, I know it would be set in a typeface called Rotis, a typeface still modern but less dogmatic and more legible than Helvetica, designed by the late Otl Aicher, best known for the pictograms of Olympic sports developed for the 1972 Munich Games. It would then match the "corporate" style of the Foster office and the signs in his buildings - an obsession with conformity so driven, incidentally, that Foster has even seen to it that buildings of his that predate the design of the typeface have been retro-fitted with the new script.
The work of chefs is ephemeral by its nature. Books give their dishes, and them, a kind of immortality. So, too, with architects. "When we build let us think that we build for ever," wrote John Ruskin. In a book.
"Richard Rogers' Complete Works Volume One" is published by Phaidon Press at £59.95
