That’s why everything from the internal postboxes to the loo handles to the kitchens were seen as one complete vision. During the beginning of the lockdown in 2020, I began walking around my local neighbourhood in Hampstead and Highgate, which are rich in Modernist houses,” she says. Here, Matt Gibberd and his business partner, Albert Hill, employ 25 office-based staff; they have more across the country. The peculiar thing about the Modern House is that it has become such a colossal hit with those who could never hope to afford even the cheapest of its listings. A project that was four years in the making, Laurent combines a mixture of sensitive portraits of older residents along with beautiful architectural photographs that offer pleasing geometric compositions of what feels like a crumbling, ghostly world.

Neglected Utopia: Photographer explores the forgotten

In the 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto, he declared: “Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of a million workers, like the crystal symbol of a new faith.However, what particularly illuminates this book is alluded to in the second part of its title the buildings and the people who live in them today.

Modernist Estates

As well as the best one-off Modernist houses, the Collections cover loft apartments, conversions, plots of land, new homes, flats on the Barbican Estate, Span houses, and much more. Photograph: Jacek Kadaj/Alamy Bauhaus HQ … the Dessau art school building designed by Walter Gropius in 1925. Having previously published a review of UK examples, mostly around London, Stefi Orazi has now taken the format across Europe to 15 estates from Scandinavia to Spain, and covering a period from the early 1930s right up to the completion of Neave Brown’s Medina project in Eindhoven in 2002. Rowley Way was built between 1972-78 by the revered Modernist architect Neave Brown and has been given a rate Grade II* listing by English Heritage in recognition of its architectural significance.

It sounds a bit pathetic now but aged 13 I would’ve asked my parents for a book on architecture and minimalism for Christmas,” he says.

Modernist Estates Modernist Estates

Gibberd, whose father and grandfather were both architects, had also inherited the family interest in buildings. Commissioned by the city, it was designed by Gropius and built in 1925-26 to house the various departments of a school that taught everything from furniture design to architecture to typography.

These young and progressive architects rejected the trend for high-rise developments that had been popular after the war in favour of good quality, well-planned, low-rise buildings. The Modern House London offices occupy the ground floor of St Alphege hall, a 1930s church hall in Borough, south London.