The Architects’ Cookbook (and our namesake)

Encyclopaedic in nature—containing thousands of architectural drawings that depict construction details, building systems, material usages and human proportions, Architectural Graphic Standards (AGS) is used by designers who wish to understand the detailed workings of various architectural configurations. From Acoustical Design to Zirconium Melting Points, AGS is a compendium of visual information and representational conventions.

Simultaneously an anthology, a typological treatise, and a canonical and technological barometer of its time, AGS is as significant for what it leaves out as for what it includes: there are no depictions of mud-hut bricks or bamboo scaffolding, no doghouses and no instructions for demolition. AGS acts as a bridge between the general and the specific; it illustrates examples of generic situations and usages, with the intention that these depictions will be re-interpreted and re-integrated within specific designs and drawings. And while there are no explicit instructions pertaining to aesthetics per se, it defines, and in a way earns, through its megalomaniacal comprehensiveness, an aesthetic of it own. Clean, methodical, decisive, and explicit, it is the paragon of Modernist sensibility, packaged in a suitably hyper-modern, all-seeing comprehensive taxonomy of “howness”.

Architectural Graphic Standards
abv., colloquial form: 'graphic standards'
John Ray Hoke Jr., editor in chief
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ.  1088 pages. $250 (US)
In continuous publication since 1932. Now in 11th Edition,
Above: Cover of our very own and cherished 3rd Edition (1941)