Detail of Denys Lasdun's National Theatre, completed 1976 when modern architecture was at its most unpopular
My review article for History Today 'Constructing Modernism' has now appeared in the May edition. It deals with the historiography of modern architecture in Britain, the vagaries of how modern architecture has been written about and interpreted over the past eighty years or so. 'Years ago there was a general consensus on the history of modern architecture, based on the idea that the combination of engineering advances and avant garde art had produced an inevitable and necessary new architecture'...'Modern architecture has been a more than usually contentious subject in Britain... its widely perceived failure is a particularly British story, unfamiliar in, say, Holland or Brazil. This has been associated in particular with the failings of much modern housing, but as long ago as 1994 Glendinning and Muthesius's book Tower Block presented a calmly argued and extensively researched study of the history of social housing'...
