Paulette Singley’s recent work How to Read Architecture: An Introduction to Interpreting the Built Environment is an intricate journey through the multifarious and oftentimes overwhelming nature of the architectural world. The author’s adept use of language smoothly carries readers through a selected yet extensive number of historical, contemporary, multicultural, and geographically diverse examples of architecture. During the course of this navigation, she offers interpretations of buildings, monuments, ruins, meanings, cultural contexts, and abstract concepts that have brought each specific architecture to the fore. For every case study under examination, Singley employs (and suggests) principles and interpretation techniques that can explain the text (explication de texte) of architecture. Her intention is to forward a reading of the built environment beyond the notions of use, form and function, opening up our understanding to the “external, internal and intrinsic pressures” (5) that bring architecture to life.

The book is built on a clear four-part structure. Part One, titled “Reading Between the Lines,” discusses the connection between buildings and books. Reading is understood as a literal process, particularly when it comes to signs, words, and language inscribed on architecture. The following three parts are defined by the way one is situated in relation to a building. The titles “Outside-In Architecture,” “Inside-Out Architecture,” and “Out-and-Out Architecture” seem to suggest a straightforward description of what one will encounter in each part’s respective chapters, yet the author surprises the reader with the creative, humorous, and at times unexpected concepts and notions she dedicates these chapters to. In “Outside-In Architecture,” for example, while the situatedness of architecture is examined within its cultural, temporal, and sociopolitical context, Singley moves beyond these categories and connects architecture with elements of the culinary arts, psychoanalysis, and theatrical scenography.

At the same time, she touches upon and critically comments on important theoretical ideas that have for years defined the conversation regarding context, like critical regionalism. In “Inside-Out Architecture” Singley investigates the most tangible, even banal, elements that define the interior space of architecture, such as environmental controls and material performances. In a time when architectural discourse is characterized by an “atmospheric turn,” with many publications attempting to grasp, define, and stage the fleeting and elusive atmospheres of space, Singley examines the very pragmatic aspect of the term, as temperature and humidity within a building. In “Out-and-Out Architecture” she discusses type, form, and enclosure, suggesting unique typological approaches in interpreting the built environment, under categories like “rational” or “digital” types.

One element that could have been addressed, however, is the final aftertaste of the book. Without a concluding chapter bringing together all the notions discussed independently throughout the different chapters, the reader seems to end a well-cooked four-dish meal without a digestif; a digestif that can lead to a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the built environment’s wonderful complexities. This concluding part (possibly titled “In-and-In Architecture”) could also touch briefly on the very intimate nature of architecture, its mesmerizing and almost metaphysical qualities, its capacity to leave us speechless or make us dream while we are in its presence. Such an encounter may defy interpretations or readings, but it allows us to partake of the built world in an immersive, embodied, and emotional way that undoubtedly enhances and reinforces the rational and categorical reading suggested by the author.