These book reviews were originally published in C20 magazine and are in date order of review.
Stuck in London for much of the summer, Alistair Hall’s London Street Signs brought me joy. It might sound nerdy, but it’s not just for font fanatics. Hall is a co-founder of the children’s writing and mentoring centre Ministry of Stories, as w...
All art constantly aspires to the condition of music, wrote Walter Pater in 1877: in music, subject and form are presented as one. Goethe saw architecture as frozen music, and the two art forms share a cultural lineage and language of harmony, rhythm...
First published in 1896 by the then-elderly Banister Fletcher, professor of architecture at Kings College London, and his son, Banister Flight Fletcher, A History of Architecture soon became such a well-known standard text book that it was known simp...
Richard Seifert: British Brutalist Architect is designed by Stefi Orazi, whose own books and Modernist Estates blog show her passion for mid-century buildings. The images are mainly black and white, with full-page slanting shots of the most strongly ...
Circles and Squares takes its readers into the studios and homes of many of the artists, architects and clients who sought to ‘make it new’ in the 1920s and 1930s. From Barbara Hepworth, Winifred Nicholson and Ben Nicholson, Herbert Read and Marg...
These two new books approach their subject from very different perspectives and there is not as much overlap as you might expect. In Arts and Crafts Churches Alec Hamilton claims that over 600 churches can be identified as Arts & Crafts (at least...
It can’t be often that Radio 4’s ‘Book of the Week’ features a book about a modern house, but The See-Through House was the programme’s choice in May this year. Although it is a book about Shelley Klein’s father, the textile designer Bern...
Japan and the West: An Architectural Dialogue is an heroic book, packed with information and insight. If it’s perhaps more of an encyclopaedia than something to be read through in its entirety, Neil Jackson wears his erudition lightly. The topic...
In The Edwardians and their Houses: the New Life of Old England, C20 trustee Brittain-Catlin doesn’t try to supplant the many excellent monographs and broader surveys of Edwardian architecture. Instead he writes as much about the clients as the act...
It was perhaps because of one of its illustrations that Colin Buchanan’s 1963 government report was so widely reported – everywhere from the Daily Worker to The Tablet – and reprinted as a mass-market Penguin paperback. The illustrator Kenneth ...
There are few monographs on ecclesiastical architects of the 20th century. Research for our recent book 100 Churches 100 Years made clear how many major figures have no publication devoted to them – even designing a cathedral does not seem to quali...
This exhibition in Paris last winter took its title from a supremely confident quote. ‘There is a whole new world that absorbs our interest, because ultimately, the Profession of Architecture is work in the service of humanity,’ wrote Charlotte P...
How will post-modernism evolve after Charles Jencks? I recall standing, strangely enough, in a phone-box off Fitzroy Square, feeding in a stream of coins in return for advice, proffered half-cajolingly and half-proprietorially, on Post-Modern Buildin...
These two books were recommended to me by David Heath, chair of our Casework Committee, who told me The Honeywood File was one of the best books about the trials and tribulations of being an architect and the relationships between the parties involve...
Of the 140 cinemas built before 1939, only 52 survive, of which 20 are listed. In Odeon Relics: Nineteen-thirties Icons in the Twenty-first Century, Philip Butler has photographed them all, in their current ‘weathered’ state. In some cases ‘wea...
In these austere times, how many local authorities commission a book about their housing stock? Step forward Nottingham City Homes, the strategic housing service set up within the city council in 2005, which has since built over 500 new homes and upg...
The latest book from David Lawrence will be most useful for C20 casework. It is essentially about British Rail station design, and follows on from his 2016 book, BR Designed. It traces the foundations of modernity in British railway architecture befo...
If ever you could judge a book by its cover, it is Boom Cities: the pop art explosion and speech bubble capture the euphoria of 1960s city centres. Such developments have not been the subject of much academic research; as Saumarez Smith explains, ‘...
The small-format 1965 edition (covering both West and East Sussex) was written by Ian Nairn and Nikolaus Pevsner. This new volume is vastly expanded, and, with a wealth of new information, it is an indulgent pleasure to revisit familiar places and ma...
The Bauhaus centenary has seen a slew of publications celebrating the influence and global reach of what was arguably the most significant design school of the 20th century. Among these, Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective moves our focus away from a...
We are still populating our book review section. You will be able to search by book name, author or date of publication.
Become a C20 member today and help save our modern design heritage.