The book looks at ingenious architectural solutions: impossibly skinny houses wedged into narrow plots, spacious homes built into neglected infill sites and comfortable homes created in tiny spaces. As featured in the London Review of Books, ArchDaily, Dezeen, Wallpaper, World of Interiors, Design Boom, New York Times T Magazine and elsewhere. Jonathan Bell has written for Wallpaper* magazine since 1999, covering everything from architecture and transport design to books, tech and graphic design. The author’s ambition to give equal space to as many architects as possible, unfortunately, left many of the iconic buildings that we associate with Brutalism out of the picture.

His introspective project is eloquently arranged around several internal courtyards and constructed out of all-concrete surfaces. This one steps into the breach nicely and obliquely - it has a very useful gazetteer of buildings and housing estates and excellent photographs, but avoids both sociology and 'fuck yeah concrete' fetishism, preferring serious analysis of what Parisian Brutalism actually is in terms of structure, materials and urban form. From Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, now a thriving public space, to the former landfill site transformed into Cairo’s Al-Azhar Park, to Bangkok’s Thammasat University Urban Farm, the largest organic rooftop farm in Asia, the forward-thinking green projects featured in this stunning book offer abundant glimpses of a greener future.

Although I got a bit of a treat at the many structures I had never set eyes on before, particularly the likes of The Freeway Park in Seattle, Vaillancourt Fountain, San Francisco, Milwaukee County War Memorial. Including only a single building by such masters as Gropius, Nervi, and Niemeyer, the book excluded many of their definitively Brutalist masterpieces. A collection of illustrated cut-out paper models, inspired by the brutalist architecture of London from the 1960s to the 1970s, featuring some of the most controversial concrete constructions scattered around the districts of Camden, Southwark and Tower Hamlets. Looks to the past, present and future of the style, revaluating the timeline and examining a deeper geopolitical context. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of our daily interactions with architecture, looking at stairs, floors and paths, moving interior spaces, perception and perspective, transparency and the relationship between a building and its setting.

Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. Dr Robin Wilson is a critic, curator and associate professor of history and theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

A playful exploration of the socialist-era architecture erected in the former Polish People’s Republic. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Originally published by Zupagrafika in 2015, the internationally acclaimed 'Brutal London' collection was translated into this book in 2016.