Teo Degas' Books & Decks

I was looking for one of the Taschen wonderful compilation books on Arts, and I could not find any at my local bookshop, so I bought this book instead, to have it as a coffee-table book. This being the case, and the book being so bulky and edited, I did something I rarely do, which is buying a hard-copy book without spending enough time browsing through it. Big mistake.

You know a book of this kind is biased and not serious when countries with a huge large history of awesome architecture that have passed the proof of time are forgotten in favour of the UK and USA. I don't mean to say that the buildings in the book are not great, it is that the way the book is structured gives the impression and "sells" that UK is the country with the most wonderful awesome innovative architecture out there, disregarding the bigger achievements in architecture of countries like France, Italy and Spain. As the book includes architecture from Ancient times and Antiquity, the bias becomes even more obvious because parts of the world with wow ancient architecture are completely misrepresented in favour of countries like... Australia.That is not to say that one country is better than other, because I do love Australia, but the History of Architecture in Australia is not of the calibre of that of Greece for reasons that are obvious to any Art Historian. Yet, Greece's entries are.... just FIVE!

Isn't that called an imperialistic view of the world?

Just to give an example of the crap selection, take Syria and Lebanon for example, two countries with wow Ancient and Medieval architecture. Syria's only building included is the Great Mosque. Architectonic wonders as Palmyra, Boshra, Aleppo's Old Souq (now destroyed), any of the Templars castles, architectonic water deposits are forgotten.... Lebanon's only building listed is the building of a nightclub as if some of their Ancient temples and castles were not wow; Balbek, comes to mind.

There is also a meagre misrepresentation of Asian architecture, in general, and I missed the Utopian Garden in Singapore, although this might be just because it was finished after the update of the book.  Ethiopia just one entry, Thailand two entries, come on! Botswana not even included.

Of course you cannot include every single great building or architectural wonder in a book of this sort, but if you do a selection of this sort, so biased and narcissist, you have lost my respect as a publishing house and editor.

If this was not bad enough, the editor has done a terrible job with the indexes. The indexes are fragmented, the Index of Buildings (not by type but by name!) and the Index of Countries are one at the beginning of the book and the other at the back. No index of featured architects is included. The Index of Countries is in between the Glossary and the Index of Contributors. And no type of building index either. An example of how not to make an index, Mr Editor.

The photos are nice, some of them great, some others not, and not all buildings come with a photo. The texts are informative and well written and might you help to understand (or probably not) why some of those buildings are there beyond being... British as a main point to be included in the book. 

I have decided that the book is perfect for toilet reading :)