These book reviews were originally published in C20 magazine and are in date order of review.
Rescue and Reuse: Communities, Heritage and Architecture (eds. Merlin Waterson and Ian Morrison, RIBA Publishing, 144pp, £35, 2019) Although planned as a handbook for community groups wanting to take on a major conservation project, this book is no...
Unfamiliar with the south-east before my twenties, Stevie Smith’s paean to the county took me by surprise. ‘Hertfordshire is my love, it is so un-exciting, so quiet, its woods so thick and abominably drained, so pashy underneath…’ Over the Fr...
Nearly four million houses were built in Britain between the two World Wars. Most were in the suburbs, with over 2.8 million built speculatively for private sale. In 1995 Deborah Sugg Ryan moved into one of them, in the Oxford suburb of Wolvercote. S...
This is one of several recent books of dramatic photographs of buildings from around the world that – with a few caveats – are labelled ‘brutalist’. Chadwick, an art director and graphic designer who works in the music business, set up the Th...
Brutalism is big business in the media, with TV programmes, books and blogs of varying quality. The pioneer of the genre was perhaps Owen Hatherley, who in 2007 called for a reaction against the cosy humanism of an Alvar Aalto exhibition in favour of...
Unlike Barnabas Calder’s buildings in London or Glasgow, the urbane, historic peninsula that is Boston, Massachusetts does not immediately impress as a brutalist city. Heroic makes you think again. One of the US’s great intellectual capitals and ...
Some guides to London’s architecture fit in your pocket, others answer questions arising from more serendipitous strolls. Caroline Swash plugs a gap by focusing on stained glass. Her 2001 guide 14 walks themed around stained glass offered valuable ...
I had been eagerly anticipating the arrival of this book, having been to Turn End with the Society in 2010. I also have the other two books about the practice: Aldington, Craig and Collinge by Alan Powers (2009) in the Society’s Twentieth Century A...
This is a handy folder of leaflets about post-war churches in Greater Manchester. There is one place of worship per local authority in Greater Manchester, and three in the City of Manchester itself – 12 in total. This includes Wythenshawe, the larg...
This book includes an ‘A-Z of Brutalist Architecture’ by Jonathan Meades in which he points out that neither Sheppard Robson’s Hall of Residence in South Kensington (listed but scandalously demolished, despite a C20 Society campaign) nor any of...
The immense creativity of the post-war period was most evident in the use of new materials and forms of construction. That was as true for Belgium as for any other European country, though the significance of what was happening there may not have reg...
There are two problems with any exhibition about Charles and Ray Eames. One is that it relies on sponsorship from the two licensed makers of their furniture, Herman Miller and Vitra; the other that it relies on the cooperation of their descendants to...
The estate agent ‘The Modern House’ was formed in 2005 by Albert Hill and Matt Gibberd. You may have seen their adverts in this magazine. As a business it has done much to ensure that the houses and flats of our period are marketed to people who ...
This contribution to Reaktion’s ‘Modern Architectures in History’ series will go on my bookshelf beside a handful of crucial texts on Russian architecture. It is a much needed English-language book on the subject, and a valuable source for furt...
His dates – 1662-1736 – may be way outside our period, but Nicholas Hawksmoor, best known for his six massive Portland stone churches in London, has had a profound effect on many major C20 architects. The restoration of some of Hawksmoor’s key ...
Alan Clawley has been the most dogged supporter of Birmingham’s Central Library over the decade and a half leading up to its demise. While Library Story pays tribute to John Madin’s notable architecture, it’s as much about the myths, propaganda...
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