Architecture, Criticism and History

Alongside his roles as director of some of Britain's leading artistic institutions, Charles Saumarez Smith has had a long-standing interest in architecture and has written about it extensively, most recently as the architecture critic of The Critic. This volume brings together a selection of his reflections on architecture, in which he seeks to uncover the ideas that shape it and to explore broader questions of architectural politics, town planning, and design culture. While the book mostly focuses on modern and contemporary architecture, there are sections on older buildings and, throughout the book, the author weaves in the history of the sites and structures, and the fascinating characters and ideas behind them. Examples range from a beautiful Arts & Crafts church institute in North Wales by Herbert North to a Louis-Kahn inspired university building near Cork, a small but perfectly formed new house, Nithurst Farm, and a huge new Humanities Centre in Oxford. He considers larger-scale urban developments, from well-known masterplans in London, such as King's Cross, to lesser known, but inspiring, examples of new towns, such as Tornagrain in Scotland, and interrogates government policy on the built environment. The book's scope extends beyond buildings to the architectural world itself - its organisations, awards, and collections. Saumarez Smith discusses the Stirling Prize, the RIBA Drawings Collection, the Farrell Centre and architectural heroes, including Pevsner, Rykwert and Stamp, along with a notable villain. He concludes with a section on the city of London, investigating how certain ill-conceived structures came to be built and who was responsible. Each piece is 900 words in length, making the book ideal for dipping into. Taken together, these essay form an elegant yet forceful call to arms: a reminder of the challenges facing our built environment and an argument for how we might better understand, value, and shape our towns and cities now and in the future.