In the contemporary cultural environment, various political aspects of this canonical material may be difficult to appreciate. Responses to Philip Johnson, for example, whose politics Frampton never admired, have shifted radically since the first edition. Rather than valorize specific figures, Frampton’s intent is to identify the breadth of architectonic issues and responses found in modern buildings across the world, and to explain those in a succinct and coherent way, with the larger goal of making the field more socially and environmentally responsible.

Modern Architecture is also filled with excellent visual material, ranging from the historic photo of Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier at a Paris café table in the early 1920s, with Ise Gropius sitting nearby, to an iconic view of the then-recently completed Eames House in Los Angeles (1949) and Francis Keré’s primary school in Burkina Faso (2001). The text quickly conveys the story of how new ways of building and thinking about architecture have been transformative across the world.

Among the most valuable aspects of Modern Architecture are its many precise architectural drawings, which include detailed floor plans, sections, axonometrics, and analytic perspectives. Drawn by generations of architecture students, these differentiate the book from more standard architecture publications that consist mainly of photographs. As with any textbook, one can quibble about some of the specific project choices. Inevitably, for a book first published in 1980, the contemporary situation of the architectural profession within the real environmental legacies of racial segregation and gender and economic inequality could at points be more substantially addressed. Nonetheless, Frampton’s work still offers a greatly expanded and accessible historical introduction to many of the key issues and problems of contemporary architectural design.