It would be difficult to imagine two more different architecture books than a scholarly tract such as Classical Greek Architecture by Alexander Tzonis and Phoebe Giannisi (Flammarion £48) and a crowd-pleaser such as Superstructures by Neil Parkyn (Merrell £25)... From the Times Online
The former is all about graceful ruins, the latter all about the supposed marvels of present-day technology, from the Channel Tunnel to the new Wembley stadium. But by subtitling their book “the construction of the modern”, the authors of the first book are staking classicism's claim to be as relevant today as when the Parthenon was built. With excellent photographs and drawings, it is a beautiful piece of design in its own right.
Superstructures, however, is all to do with the notion of progress from a technological point of view. It is full of macho stuff, covering more than a century of boundary-pushing structures, from the 1897 big wheel in Vienna to the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, the most complex scientific instrument ever built. There is plenty of architecture in this book, but always architecture that achieves its impact (like a great bridge or airport) through advances in structural engineering.
Exploring Architecture by Eleanor Gawne, Michael Snodin and others (RIBA/V&A £30) is published to coincide with the excellent new Architecture Gallery at the Victoria and Albert museum. It is a broad-based, well-written canter through the history of building, which makes some telling juxtapositions between ancient and modern, East and West.
More specialised, but entirely fascinating, is The Twentieth- Century House in Britain by Alan Powers (Aurum £40). It is a simple concept  all the examples come from the archives of Country Life, thus proving that the favourite organ of aspirational green-welly wearers can deploy some cutting-edge material when it chooses. Powers marshals his material cogently and genially, from Arts and Crafts to high-tech. The lure of the country house is as powerful as ever.
As is the lure of religion, shown by New Sacred Architecture by Phyllis Richardson (Laurence King £45). After some years in the doldrums, the design of religious buildings has recently taken quite a leap forward, with several leading architects taking part. Raj Rewal's Ismaili Centre in Lisbon brings Islamic geometry into the computer age, while Renzo Piano's church of San Giovanni Rotondo in Foggia, Italy, does much the same for the tradition of arch and buttress.
To end on another crowd-pleaser: Skyscrapers by Andres Lepik (Prestel £18) is about just that, in a lucid if somewhat staccato survey of 50 examples from 19th-century Chicago to 21st-century Beijing, where architect Rem Koolhaas is waggishly tying the conventional tower into a knot. The skyscraper, too, is being reinvented: it's a good time to take stock.
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