Buildings which capture the mood of our century

The 20th century has surely been the century of construction. More buildings have probably been built within the past 100 years than in the rest of human history. And more have been destroyed, too, by two world wars and numerous lesser conflicts as well as by increasingly devastating natural disasters.

Jonathan Glancey, architecture correspondent of The Guardian, has gathered together the best of it in his latest book, Twentieth Century Architecture, a fascinating compendium which is intended to give the reader a real sense of the "sheer diversity of buildings in a century that has witnessed mind-boggling change." As the author puts it, "society might have wanted more buildings than it had in the past, especially housing, and it certainly wanted a far greater range of buildings too - swimming-pools, superstores, motorway service stations, airports, bowling alleys, corporate headquarters - but it wanted much more for much less."

The results, as we all know, could be dire. Glancey suggests that part of the reason for this has to do with increasingly sophisticated technology, which has enabled us to build with ever-increasing speed. And in the process, he argues, architects have become "inexorably marginalised", reduced to being part of a team led by others.

He quotes veteran US architect Philip Johnson's saying that architects are "whores" - in that they get paid for doing what other people want. "And that means the design of banal office blocks and brainless shopping malls as well as beautiful private houses and churches that have the power to reduce the noisiest citizen to silence."

Each new building by a good architect is "a fresh attempt to create a model of perfection", Glancey writes. But he suggests that none will ever attain the perfection of the Parthenon, on the Acropolis of Athens, which "even in its ruined state . . . stands as judge of all the architecture that has been built in the cast of its long shadow."

Architecture nowadays is "kaleidoscopic, its message fragmented and inconclusive". In a period of rapid social change, increasingly driven by technology, "there could be no one style of architecture that would ever be capable of freeze-framing the world". Even the Modern Movement was "doomed to failure", according to the author.

Nonetheless, in discussing how he selected the 370 buildings which are illustrated in his book, Glancey says they include many that no writer would dare to exclude because they are "buildings that define a moment, generate a mood, first make use of a new technology" and thus are not only fascinating but hugely influential.

He also makes it clear his view that "what passed for post-modernism in architecture, with honourable exceptions, is ugly and crass. I do not think that architecture is a particularly funny subject and jokes writ on the scale of a building are embarrassing and even pitiful some years down the line." Nobody laughs anymore at old jokes.

The book is divided into sections dealing with particular movements or styles of architecture. Inevitably, however, some of the categorisation is quite arbitrary. Why, for example, is the clean-lined, rationalist Mussoliniera railway station of Santa Maria Novella in Florence classified as "organic" architecture? The treatment of art deco masterpieces seems particularly random, with the former Daily Express offices in London's Fleet Street - its lobby plucked from Busby Berkeley - classified as "Modern" while the Chrysler Building in New York, "probably the best-loved high-rise building in the world", appears in the "Robotic" section.

And what would I.M Pei make of his once-controversial, but equally well-loved pyramid at the Louvre being categorised as "post-modern", alongside such faddish works as Philip Johnson's Chippendale-pedimented AT&T Building in New York and Michael Graves's briefly trendy but utterly superficial Civic Centre in Portland, Oregon? The book is led by a section on Arts and Crafts which Glancey describes as "part and parcel of a peculiarly English sentiment", though many of its finest and most original exponents were not English - notably Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose highly-original Glasgow School of Art is one of the author's all-time favourites.

Glancey moves on to deal with the 20th century's "rich and varied" neo-classical architecture, embracing such landmarks as New York's Grand Central Station, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and Gunnar Asplund's splendid Stockholm City Library which, as he rightly suggests, comes close to being "timeless". It was only in the 1980s that classicism became thoroughly debased, with buildings that "made a mockery of the attempts by an earlier generation of architects . . . to revive the spirit of Greece and Rome". Of Ricardo Bofil's hideous giant order housing, he admits that "many of us secretly hoped that it might really work".

There is another section on "organic" architecture, in which some of the extraordinary surrealist works of Barcelona's most famous architect, Antoni Gaudi, take pride of place. Frank Lloyd Wright's "winding, gyrating, twisting Martian snail" of the Guggenheim Museum in New York is also included here and on the book's front cover.

Glancey agrees that Wright was the most important US architect of the 20th century and he is hugely enthusiastic about Falling Water, the delightful house he built in rural Pennsylvania in 1936. Earlier, more avant garde Modern houses by Le Corbusier, Gerrit Rietveld and Mies van der Rohe are also heaped with reverential praise.

For it was Le Corbusier, in 1922, who first propagated the truly 20th century notion of "the house as a machine for living in" - with "bathrooms, sun, hot and cold water, temperatures which can be adjusted as required, food storage, hygiene, beauty in harmonious proportions . . . (and) a taste for clean air". The author regards Corb's startlingly forward-looking houses, built for private clients in the 1920s, and the humanitarian ideals that inspired his Unite d'Habitation in Marseille (1952) as cultural counterweights to his notorious role as Godfather of all those high-rise concrete blocks built, like Ballymun, in windswept "parkland" settings.

Some of the most notorious examples of this genre - by far the most regrettable legacy of 20th century architecture - are featured in the book. They include Alton West, a "vast aggregation of local authority flats", and Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower - "the sort of architecture one wouldn't want to bump into on a dark night".

However, as Glancey notes, the Modern movement was redeemed by the humane qualities of such wonderful buildings as the Paimo Sanatorium (1932) and the Saynatsalo Civic Centre (1952), by the great Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, and by Mies's "sublime" Farnsworth House in Illinois (1951), among many other examples. Not a single building in Ireland gets a look-in, though a case could be made for including both Busaras and Dublin Airport's original terminal. Irish-born designer Eileen Gray is included for her influential E.1027 seaside house on the French Riviera (1929) and Kevin Roche for his "hugely impressive" Ford Foundation in New York (1967).

The only other Irish person mentioned - and deservedly, too - is Peter Rice, the brilliant Dundalk-born structural engineer who won the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture before he died in 1992; one of his many dazzling achievements was to make the Sydney Opera House, that icon of Australia and of 20th century architecture, stand up.

Other such icons - from Berthold Lubetkin's white concrete-spiralled Penguin Pool at London Zoo (1934) to Renzo Piano's and Richard Rogers's Pompidou Centre in Paris (1977) - receive the author's, and the public's, acclaim.

Glancey also reflects changing perceptions of Pop-era classics such as London's once-reviled Centre Point.

He cites Jean Nouvel's inspirational Arab Institute in Paris (1987) as a turning point in re-establishing the reputation of Modern architecture and gives credit, too, to such outstanding works as Norman Foster's Communications Tower in Barcelona, Daniel Liebskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin and Frank Gehry's recent outpouring in Bilbao.

Worldwide in its scope, erudite and well-observed, Glancey's book also includes two postscripts dealing with the radically-different concepts of cities thrown up by the 20th century and futuristic "brave new worlds" from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) to Peter Cook's "Plug-in City" (1964). It is a "must" for anyone interested in architecture.

Twentieth Century Architecture, by Jonathan Glancey, is published by Carlton, price £29.95 (sterling).