Books Round Up: The Isokon, Pierre Koenig, Concrete Conservation and more.

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...

The Buildings of England: Hertfordshire

James Bettley, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry (Yale University Press, 804pp, £35)

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...

Ideal Homes, 1918-39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism

Deborah Sugg Ryan ( Manchester University Press, 264pp, £19.99)

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...

Raw Concrete: the Beauty of Brutalism

Barnabas Calder (William Heinemann, 416pp, £25)

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...

Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston 1960 – 1976

Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo and Chris Grimley (Monacelli Press, 435pp, £35)

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 ...

Post-War Building Materials in Housing in Brussels, 1945 – 1975

Stephanie Van de Voorde, Inge Bertels and Ine Wouters (postwarbuildingmaterials.be)

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...

Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings around the World

Christopher Beanland (Frances Lincoln, 192pp, £20)

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...

Sacred Suburbs

Angela Connelly and Matthew Steele (Modernist Society, £7 themodernist.org)

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...

Houses: created by Peter Aldington

with an overview by John Pardey (RIBA Publishing, 272pp, £49.95)

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 Brutal World

Paul Chadwick (Phaidon, 224pp, £29.95)

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...