BOOK REVIEW : Unsung Architecture Turns Critic’s Head : LOOKING AROUND: A Journey Through Architecture, <i> by Witold Rybczynski</i> , Viking $22; 301 pages

Witold Rybczynski, professor of architecture at McGill University in Montreal, is about as gentlemanly a writer as you can imagine.

That quality was apparent in his previous books--among them “Waiting for the Weekend,” “The Most Beautiful House in the World,” and “Home: A Short History of an Idea”--but is especially conspicuous in “Looking Around,” a collection of Rybczynski’s architectural criticism.

Unlike many architecture critics, and even more art critics, Rybczynski isn’t out to champion those he admires and crucify those he doesn’t; his mind is more tolerant, and his opinions better developed, than that.

It’s striking, consequently, when in the last chapter of “Looking Around” Rybczynski shows, well, not fangs exactly, but incisors.

In addressing the eternal question of whether architecture is one of the fine arts or simply the utilitarian art of building, Rybczynski writes of two things that have obviously bewildered him: that students in other architecture classes have been told that “housing is not really architecture at all,” and that in a recent photo-essay on a new house, some items from the client’s art collection were removed during the picture-taking “because the architect did not approve every artifact.”

These belated flashes of criticism--anemic, to be sure, when wrenched out of context this way--are noteworthy because they confirm what the reader has suspected all along: Rybczynski’s deepest interest lies not in buildings per se but in the places people live.

It’s no coincidence that the titles of his two best-known books, mentioned above, contain the word house or home , or that the best section in this book is called “Homes and Houses.”

Rybczynski is quite comfortable writing about Michael Graves’ Portland Building in Oregon, or the Lloyd’s of London headquarters designed by Richard Rogers, or the museums of Cesar Pelli and Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis I. Kahn, but you get the sense his heart is elsewhere--that he’d much rather meditate on an age-old design for a country cottage, or discuss new ways of making urban life attractive.

In the introduction to “Looking Around,” Rybczynski confesses longstanding reservations about the value of architectural criticism. His reasoning makes sense--critical analysis is somewhat superfluous when buildings will be used regardless, reviews are unavoidably sterile when written before a building is broken in--yet his misgivings seem to run as much toward architecture as toward architectural criticism.

Rybczynski is willing to look at and even admire the new and monolithic, as most architecture critics seem compelled to do, but he’d rather spend time with the traditional and the intimate.

And that’s why, although Rybczynski finally declares “Of course architecture is an art,” you can’t help feeling he wishes it were thought of as a craft.

He is stirred to some of his best writing not by cutting-edge architecture but by the idiosyncratic, lighthearted decoration of a Swedish artist’s home; the single best piece in “Looking Around” commences with a description of the “Grow House,” a tiny row house built by Rybczynski and colleagues in 1990 to demonstrate that small is not only beautiful but also sometimes better.

In the book’s final chapter Rybczynski makes explicit his love for homey, unsung architecture when he writes, ruefully, “The study of architecture could now be described not as the study of all important buildings but as the study of the work of a relatively small number of important architects.”

It’s a point well taken, for although the suburban bungalow may not be a respected building, as Rybczynski notes, it has served its purpose admirably--which cannot be said of many buildings with much higher profiles.