A previously unpublished work by Nikolaus Pevsner, much of which was published as journal articles in the Architectural Review in the 1940s and 1950s during Pevsner's term as editor.

Niche Tactics aligns architecture's relationship with site with its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment. Bracketed between texts on giraffe morphology, ecological perception, ugliness, and hopeful monsters, architectural case studies investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined, from the anomalous city designs of Francesco de Marchi in the sixteenth century to Le Corbusier’s near eradication of context in his Plan Voisin in the twentieth century to the more recent contextualist movements. Extensively illustrated with 140 drawings and photographs, Niche Tactics considers how attention to site might create a generative language for architecture today.

Shaping the Surface explores the history of modern British architecture through the lens of surface, materiality and decoration. Picking up on a trait that art historian Nikolaus Pevsner first identified as a 'national mania for beautiful surface quality', this book makes a new contribution to architectural history and visual culture in its detailed examination of the surfaces of British architecture from the middle of the 19th century up to the turn of the 21st century. Tracing this continuing sensibility to surface all the way through to the modern era, it explores how and why surface and materiality have featured so heavily in recent architectural tradition, examining the history of British architecture through a selection of key cultural moments and movements from Romanticism and the Arts and Crafts, to Brutalism, High-Tech, Post-Modernism, Neo-Vernacular, and the New Materiality. Embedded within the narrative is the question of whether such national characters can exist in architecture at all – and indeed the extent to which it is possible to identify a British architectural consciousness in an architectural tradition characterised by its continuous importation of theories, ideas, materials and people from around the globe. Shaping the Surface provides a deep critique and meditation on the importance of surface and materiality for architects, designers, and historians everywhere - in Britain and beyond - while it also serves as a thematic introduction to modern British architectural history, with in-depth readings of the works of many key British architects, artists, and critics from Ruskin and William Morris to Alison and Peter Smithson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Rogers and Caruso St John.

Anthony Fontenot’s staggeringly ambitious book uncovers the surprisingly libertarian heart of the most influential British and American architectural and urbanist discourses of the postwar period, expressed as a critique of central design and a support of spontaneous order. Non-Design illuminates the unexpected philosophical common ground between enemies of state support, most prominently the economist Friedrich Hayek, and numerous notable postwar architects and urbanists like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Reyner Banham, and Jane Jacobs. These thinkers espoused a distinctive concept of "non-design,"characterized by a rejection of conscious design and an embrace of various phenomenon that emerge without intention or deliberate human guidance. This diffuse and complex body of theories discarded many of the cultural presuppositions of the time, shunning the traditions of modern design in favor of the wisdom, freedom, and self-organizing capacity of the market. Fontenot reveals the little-known commonalities between the aesthetic deregulation sought by ostensibly liberal thinkers and Hayek’s more controversial conception of state power, detailing what this unexplored affinity means for our conceptions of political liberalism. Non-Design thoroughly recasts conventional views of postwar architecture and urbanism, as well as liberal and libertarian philosophies.

During the post-war era, the emerging consumer economy radically changed both the discourse and practice of architecture. It was a time where architecture became a mainstream commodity whose products sold through mass media; a time in which Thomas Gordon Cullen came to be one of Britain’s best-known twentieth-century architectural draftsmen. Despite Cullen’s wide acclaim, there has been little research into his life and work; particularly his printed images and his methods of operation. This book examines Cullen’s drawings and book design and also looks into his process of image making to help explain his considerable popularity and influence which continues to this day. It presents the lessons Cullen had to offer in today’s design culture and practice and looks into the post-war consumerist design strategies that are still used today.

Eleanor Herring's unique study of street furniture in post-war Britain considers how objects which are now familiar parts of our urban environment were designed to populate public spaces. Herring explores the design of lampposts, post boxes, parking meters, and signage in the context of a government backed by various bodies keen to propagate 'good' modern design, in a Britain whose towns and cities had been laid waste by bombing and the privations of war. She also considers the innate conservatism of local communities and councils, wary of a standardised street design imposed from above. She traces how the design of street furniture became the site of a fierce struggle which exposed deep-seated anxieties about class, taste and power. Herring's original research draws on archival material and on interviews with leading figures in urban design, including graphic designer Margaret Calvert and industrial designer Kenneth Grange.

In his landmark volume Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion paired images of two iconic spirals: Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Borromini’s dome for Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. The values shared between the baroque age and the modern were thus encapsulated on a single page spread. As Giedion put it, writing of Sant’Ivo, Borromini accomplished 'the movement of the whole pattern [...] from the ground to the lantern, without entirely ending even there.' And yet he merely 'groped' towards that which could 'be completely effected' in modern architecture-achieving 'the transition between inner and outer space.' The intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs is now widely acknowledged. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of the intellectual history of modern architecture and the history of architectural historiography. It considers the varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism. Presenting research by an international community of scholars, this book explores through a series of cross sections the traffic of ideas between practice and history that has shaped modern architecture and the academic discipline of architectural history across the long twentieth century. The editors use the historiography of the baroque as a lens through which to follow the path of modern ideas that draw authority from history. In doing so, the volume defines a role for the baroque in the history of architectural historiography and in the history of modern architectural culture.

In the history of planning, the design of an entire community prior to its construction is among the oldest traditions. Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change explores the twenty-first-century fortunes of planned communities around the world. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, the editors and contributors examine what happened to planned communities after their glory days had passed and they became vulnerable to pressures of growth, change, and even decline. Beginning with Robert Owen's industrial village in Scotland and concluding with Robert Davis's neotraditional resort haven in Florida, this book documents the effort to translate optimal design into sustaining a common life that works for changing circumstances and new generations of residents. Basing their approach on historical research and practical, on-the-ground considerations, the essayists argue that preservation efforts succeed best when they build upon foundational planning principles, address landscape, architecture, and social engineering together, and respect the spirit of place. Presenting twenty-three case studies located in six continents, each contributor considers how to preserve the spirit of the community and its key design elements, and the ways in which those elements can be adapted to contemporary circumstances and changing demographics. Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change espouses strategies to achieve critical resilience and emphasizes the vital connection between heritage preservation, equitable sharing of the benefits of living in these carefully designed places, and sustainable development. Communities: Bat'ovany-Partizánske, Cité Frugès, Colonel Light Gardens, Den-en Chôfu, Garbatella, Greenbelt, Hampstead Garden Suburb, Jardim América, Letchworth Garden City, Menteng, New Lanark, Pacaembú, Radburn, Riverside, Römerstadt, Sabaudia, Seaside, Soweto, Sunnyside Gardens, Tapiola, The Uplands, Welwyn Garden City, Wythenshawe. Contributors: Arnold R. Alanen, Carlos Roberto Monteiro de Andrade, Sandra Annunziata, Robert Freestone, Christine Garnaut, Isabelle Gournay, Michael Hebbert, Susan R. Henderson, James Hopkins, Steven W. Hurtt, Alena Kubova-Gauché, Jean-François Lejeune, Maria Cristina a Silva Leme, Larry McCann, Mervyn Miller, John Minnery, Angel David Nieves, John J. Pittari, Jr., Gilles Ragot, David Schuyler, Mary Corbin Sies, Christopher Silver, André Sorensen, R. Bruce Stephenson, Shun-ichi J. Watanabe.

Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902, Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising career as an academic in Dresden and Göttingen. When, in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his job and looked for employment in England. Here, over a long and amazingly industrious career, he made himself an authority on the exploration and enjoyment of English art and architecture, so much so that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The Buildings of England (first published 1951 - 74) is usually referred to simply as 'Pevsner'. As a critic, academic and champion of Modernism, Pevsner became a central figure in the architectural consensus that accompanied post-war reconstruction; as a 'general practitioner' of architectural history, he covered an astonishing range, from Gothic cathedrals and Georgian coffee houses to the Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks. Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsner's reported sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology, his internment in England as an enemy alien and his sometimes painful assimilation into his country of exile. His Heftchen - secret diaries he kept from the age of 14 for another sixty years - reveal hidden aspirations and anxieties, as do his numerous letters (he wrote to his wife, Lola, every day that they were apart).Harries is the first biographer to have read Pevsner's private papers and, through them, to have seen into the workings of his mind.Her definitive biography is not only rich in context and far-ranging, but is also brought to life by quotations from Pevsner himself. He was born a Jew but converted to Lutheranism; trained in the rigour of German scholarship, he became an Everyman in his copious commissions, publications, broadcasts and lectures on art, architecture, design, education, town planning, social housing, conservation, Mannerism, the Bauhaus, the Victorians, Zeitgeist, Englishness and how a nation's character may, or must, be reflected in its art. His life - as an outsider yet an insider at the heart of English art history - illuminates both the predicament and the prowess of the continental émigrés who did so much to shape British culture after 1945.

The Festival of Britain in 1951 transformed the way people saw their war-ravaged nation. Giving Britons an intimate experience of contemporary design and modern building, it helped them accept a landscape under reconstruction, and brought hope of a better world to come. Drawing on previously unseen sketches and plans, photographs and interviews, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People travels beyond the Festival's spectacular centrepiece at London's South Bank, to show how the Festival made the whole country an exhibition ground with events to which hundreds of the country's greatest architects, artists and designers contributed. It explores exhibitions in Poplar, Battersea and South Kensington in London; Belfast, Glasgow and Wales; a touring show carried on four lorries and another aboard an ex-aircraft carrier. It reveals how all these exhibitions and also plays, poetry, art and films commissioned for the Festival had a single focus: to unite 'the land and people of Britain'.