# Simon Unwin

Simon Unwin (born 1952) is a British architect and writer.

## Life

He was born in 1952 in Yorkshire, but grew up in Wales.
He studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London and the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff. From the Welsh School of Architecture, he obtained a PhD, and he went on to become a senior lecturer there.
From 2004 to 2009, he was Professor of Architecture at the University of Dundee, where he is now an emeritus professor.
He currently resides in Cardiff.

## Work

Unwin has written several books about architecture:
* An Architecture Notebook: Wall (2000) ISBN 0415228735
* Doorway (2007) ISBN 9780415458818
* Exercises in Architecture: Learning to Think as an Architect (2012) ISBN 9781136486623
* Analysing Architecture (fourth edition, 2014) ISBN 9781317810940
* Twenty-Five Buildings Every Architect Should Understand (2015; first published in 2010 as Twenty Buildings Every Architect Should Understand) ISBN 9781317555025
* The Ten Most Influential Buildings in History: Architecture's Archetypes (2016) ISBN 9781317483243
* Children as Place-makers: The Innate Architect in All of Us (2019) ISBN 9781138046009
* Curve: Possibilities and Problems with Deviating from the Straight in Architecture (2019) ISBN 9781138045941
* Metaphor: An Exploration of the Metaphorical Dimensions and Potential of Architecture (2019) ISBN 9781138045439
In Twenty-Five Buildings Every Architect Should Understand, he analyses the following buildings:
| Number | Name | Architect | Year | Description |
| 1 | Casa del Ojo de Agua | Ada Dewes and Sergio Puente | 1985–90 | A house in the Mexican jungle |
| 2 | Neuendorf House | John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin | 1987–89 | A holiday home on the island of Mallorca |
| 3 | Barcelona Pavilion | Mies van der Rohe | 1929 | Built as the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Universal Exposition |
| 4 | Truss Wall House | Kathryn Findlay and Eisaku Ushida | 1993 | A house in the Tsurukawa suburb of Machida-City, Japan |
| 5 | Endless House | Friedrich/Frederick Kiesler | 1947–61 | An unbuilt project for a house based in infinity |
| 6 | Farnsworth House | Mies van der Rohe | 1950 (designed c.1945) | On the banks of Fox River near Plano, Illinois, US |
| 7 | La Congiunta | Peter Märkli | 1992 | A gallery for the sculpture of Hans Josephsohn, Giornico, Switzerland |
| 8 | Un Cabanon | Le Corbusier | 1952 | An architect's vacation cabin at Cap Martin, on the south coast of France |
| 9 | Esherick House | Louis Kahn | 1959–61 | A house in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| 10 | Maison à Bordeaux | Rem Koolhaas | 1998 | A house for a man confined to a wheelchair |
| 11 | Danteum | Giuseppe Terragni | 1938 | An unbuilt memorial to Dante Alighieri, intended for Mussolini's Rome |
| 12 | Fallingwater | Frank Lloyd Wright | 1933–36 | The house over a water fall in rural Pennsylvania |
| 13 | Villa Savoye | Le Corbusier | 1929 | A house in the Poissy suburb of Paris, France |
| 14 | Kempsey Guest Studio | Glenn Murcutt | 1992 | A converted shed in New South Wales, Australia |
| 15 | Condominium One, The Sea Ranch | Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, Whitaker | 1965 | A settlement of ten residential units on California's north coast |
| 16 | Villa E.1027 | Eileen Gray (and Jean Badovici) | 1926–29 | An architect's vacation house at Cap Martin, on the south coast of France |
| 17 | Church of St Petri | Sigurd Lewerentz | 1963–66 | A Lutheran church in the southern Swedish town of Klippan |
| 18 | Villa Busk | Sverre Fehn | 1987–90 | A musician's house south of Oslo, Norway |
| 19 | Villa Mairea | Alvar Aalto | 1937–39 | A house in the woods of western Finland |
| 20 | Thermal Baths, Vals | Peter Zumthor | 1996 | A bathing complex attached to a hotel in a Swiss valley |
| 21 | Ramesh House | Liza Raju Subhadra (R.S. Liza) | 2003 | An environmentally responsive house in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala |
| 22 | Bardi House | Lina Bo Bardi | 1949–52 | A house in its own patch of rainforest on the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil |
| 23 | Vitra Fire Station | Zaha Hadid | 1990–93 | A fire station for a furniture factory estate in north Switzerland |
| 24 | Mohrmann House | Hans Scharoun | 1939 | A family house in the Lichtenrade suburb of Berlin, designed to subvert political restrictions |
| 25 | Bioscleave House | Madeline Gins and Arakawa | 2008 | A house extension in East Hampton, New York, designed to subvert relationships with setting to counter mortal degeneration |