Key Modern Architects: fifty short histories is published by Bloomsbury today, and the product of my work over the past several years. It presents and analyses the work of many of the most original and significant individuals working in modern architecture since its inception at the end of the nineteenth century.
In the 1920s, and the product of visionary ideologies and fractious debate, a model of modern architecture emerged which is still recognizable almost a hundred years later. But some of the most successful work was created in the 1950s and 60s when more nuanced original thinking reshaped the course of Modernism: current work remains indebted to the figures who created it.
Ideas rather than buildings are at the forefront of the book’s discussion, and the most successful architects who build are shaped by the thinking of those who have come earlier: architects’ capacity to influence is seen as paramount in presenting them as important. Architectural Modernism as a realised ideology, as cultural expression, is the focus of the book’s interest: artists as well as architects helped to form it, while the most outstanding buildings are its achieved outcome.
The book is led by words rather than images- posts I’ve recently made on Instagram and also on Facebook are meant to be a visual counterpart. As well as the reader searching for further images of the buildings and projects discussed to supplement the images in the book, mostly just one per chapter, the book will lead to further reading with the selective list of books and journals that take the interpretation of each architect beyond what the book has the space to present.
A side note: many of the architects who are discussed here few would disagree with - Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aalto, Kahn, Sullivan and so on, but beyond twenty or thirty there are very many figures who would have a claim to be in some way ‘key’. While in each essay I argue for their significance, I’m very aware that a different historian or critic would come up with a list that varied from mine. And to raise the question of historiography, all histories including this one are far from unbiased, there is certainly no claim here to be absolutely ‘right’- but I very much hope it is an interesting and useful book that gives a different interpretation of the practice modern architecture.
The cover image, courtesy of the RIBA, is of the Economist Building in London designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, in a drawing by Gordon Cullen, 1959. It represents a phase of Modernism emerging in the post war period, that related distinctly modern forms to their context and also illustrates the unique space-making that modern architecture has engaged with.
For publication details see the Bloomsbury website:
www.bloomsbury.com/key-modern-architects-9781474265034
In the 1920s, and the product of visionary ideologies and fractious debate, a model of modern architecture emerged which is still recognizable almost a hundred years later. But some of the most successful work was created in the 1950s and 60s when more nuanced original thinking reshaped the course of Modernism: current work remains indebted to the figures who created it.
Ideas rather than buildings are at the forefront of the book’s discussion, and the most successful architects who build are shaped by the thinking of those who have come earlier: architects’ capacity to influence is seen as paramount in presenting them as important. Architectural Modernism as a realised ideology, as cultural expression, is the focus of the book’s interest: artists as well as architects helped to form it, while the most outstanding buildings are its achieved outcome.
The book is led by words rather than images- posts I’ve recently made on Instagram and also on Facebook are meant to be a visual counterpart. As well as the reader searching for further images of the buildings and projects discussed to supplement the images in the book, mostly just one per chapter, the book will lead to further reading with the selective list of books and journals that take the interpretation of each architect beyond what the book has the space to present.
A side note: many of the architects who are discussed here few would disagree with - Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Aalto, Kahn, Sullivan and so on, but beyond twenty or thirty there are very many figures who would have a claim to be in some way ‘key’. While in each essay I argue for their significance, I’m very aware that a different historian or critic would come up with a list that varied from mine. And to raise the question of historiography, all histories including this one are far from unbiased, there is certainly no claim here to be absolutely ‘right’- but I very much hope it is an interesting and useful book that gives a different interpretation of the practice modern architecture.
The cover image, courtesy of the RIBA, is of the Economist Building in London designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, in a drawing by Gordon Cullen, 1959. It represents a phase of Modernism emerging in the post war period, that related distinctly modern forms to their context and also illustrates the unique space-making that modern architecture has engaged with.
For publication details see the Bloomsbury website:
www.bloomsbury.com/key-modern-architects-9781474265034