A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
051214:there are a few notes about this high rating: this book is not a five for everyone, only those of us interested in residential architecture, in city planning, in the way this was expressed in post-world war two Britain. this is a long book, covering many of the structures, plans, dreams, failures, in response to the great need for housing, for slum clearance, and the collision of utopian plans and architecture, with the world of politics, the world of actual people, that was often disregarded by professionals. i am not british, i have never lived, or even visited the estates, the old garden cities, the new towns, the cities that have survived or fallen or surpassed original utopian planning of the era. i know of them in many cases only by websites like http://www.modernistestates.com/archive or http://www.utopialondon.com/kate-macintosh or http://www.thewookie.co.uk/skyscrapers/index2.html and of course this: http://modernarchitecturelondon.com/pages/index.php, but visiting in a book or website, these are infinitely interesting to an architecture geek like me. once i wanted to be an architect, and i think it is a natural progression of interests with furniture- what you want inside- and urban planning- what you want as setting- so this was a five book for me...