Modern Architecture and Design: An Alternative History

The lively and opinionated text and more than 1,000 captioned drawings by the author provide a refreshing reinterpretation of architectural developments in the modern period.

British architect and planner Bill Risebero recreates 200 years of modern architecture and design against a backdrop of class dominance over rising industrialism. The lively and opinionated text and more than 1,000 captioned drawings by the author provide a refreshing reinterpretation of architectural developments in the modern period.

Review text:

'Risebero is writing within a European tradition, with a fundamentally Marxist intellectual stance. his book is. extremely friendly and easy to use. it includes 120 pages of full-page drawings by the author. Each takes as its theme a technological, economic or artistic event and incorporates drawings of buildings, along with such other information as sketches of historic figures, graphs of economic statistics, furniture and plans of buildings and cities, held together with narrative captions. These drawings are an unusual use of the architect's basic skill - to make sense of complexity through visual means. The book puts architects where they belong - not theorizing about dichotomies but in the real world of factories and politicians, patrons and lenders, artistic movements.'

- Thomas Hine, The Philadelphia Inquirer