Professor Paulette Singley has released a new book, How to Read Architecture: An Introduction to Interpreting the Built Environment, examining the relationship between reading and interpreting architecture. The book explores three essential ways to help readers understand architecture: reading a building from the outside-in, from the inside-out, and from the position of out-and-out, or formal, architecture. How to Read Architecture is based on the fundamental premise that reading and interpreting architecture is something we already do, and that close observation matters.
Professor Singley encourages a range of engagement with architecture, from misreading and close reading to unconventionally reading architecture to stimulate the creative process. The book brings together interior design, landscape design, and building design with chapters exploring concepts of terroir, scenography, criticality, atmosphere, tectonics, inhabitation, type, form, and enclosure. Using examples and case studies that span a wide range of historical and global precedents, Singley addresses the complex interaction among the ways a building engages its context, addresses its performative exigencies, and operates as an autonomous aesthetic object.
Singley is an internationally known architectural historian whose work expands the disciplinary limits of architecture across diverse subject matter such as food, film, and fashion. Paulette was recently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture in the College of Architecture, Art and Design at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) for the 2017-2018 academic year.