Modernist Architecture

In a location near St. Paul's Cathedral, a new self-proclaimed "ultra-modernist" office and shopping complex is going up, despite the efforts of the Prince of Wales behind the scenes to squelch the project.

Owen Hatherley presents his case for a revival of modernism, particularly in its original intent as a social reform movement, in his new book, Militant Modernism.

Utopian modernism turned on its head in Caracas, where residents have made fifty-year-old superblock housing projects into the locus of sprawling improvised settlements.

In a now infamous speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Prince accused architects of having "a surfeit of abstracted ideology over the practical realities linked to people’s lives and the grain of their culture and identity."

Steve Rose argues that the time may be ripe for a new respect for brutalism, the mid-century architectural movement that planners love to hate.