We all know the mantra first expressed by French novelist Gustave Flaubert and later by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “le bon Dieu est dans le detail,” (God dwells in the details.) But what is a detail? Is it merely a fetish as Greg Lynn, Zaha Hadid and Peter Cook argue? “Is detailing nothing more than small-scale architectural design, requiring a bit more technical knowledge simply because it occurs at the end of the process?” asks Edward R. Ford. If there is anyone that knows details it is Edward R. Ford, and he tries to answer this seminal question in his latest book. He is the author of several other books including The Details of Modern Architecture, volumes 1 and 2, but he never answered the question of what a detail is in those two influential works.
009 Preface
017 What Is a Detail?
049 There Are No Details
093 The Detail as Motif
129 The Detail as a Representation of Construction
177 The Detail as Joint
233 The Autonomous
287 What Is Detailing?
314 Selected Bibliography
316 Drawing Sources
320 Image Credits
322 Index
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press (October 19, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1568989784
ISBN-13: 978-1568989785
I guess it wasn’t brought first by Flaubert but rather by Spinoza. And of course Mies’ aphorism and Spinoza have a bit different meaning ;)