Architectural Book Awards 2023 shortlist

EDITOR’S NOTE

Booklaunch is delighted to be sponsoring the first Architectural Book Awards, the finalists of which will be announced in the summer.

On the following pages we publish our shortlist, broken down into three categories — Monographs, Reference Books and History — each of which will have its own winner, from which the overall winner of winners, the Architectural Book of the Year, will be chosen.

Architecture is an odd subject which has always overlapped into other specialisms, and never more than now, as digitisation makes it possible to calculate factors that relied in the past on instinct and experience. Architectural writing, similarly, picks up on issues more easily recognised as engineering, aesthetics, urban studies, environmentalism and art history, to name but a few, while being encumbered by a jargon that evidently pleases its own practitioners but no one else.

In considering the books submitted for these awards, the judges were therefore at pains to single out books that were excellent by any standard and not just by the standards of their own discipline, and we are hugely gratified by the first batch of titles, from which the eventual award winners will be chosen.

All titles are now on sale and can be bought from the Booklaunch website (www.booklaunch.london), where prices always offer free UK postage and usually include the most generous discounts available.

2023 Architectural Book Awards

Shortlisted: Monographs

GENTRIFICATION IS INEVITABLE: AND OTHER LIES

LESLIE KERN

Verso, 256 pages, Hardback, September 2022, 9781839767548, RRP £14.95

Leslie Kern’s book is immediately identifiable as a political work, both from its provocative title—Gentrification is Inevitable “and Other Lies”—and from the labelling of her on the cover as “author of Feminist City”. That means its agenda is also identifable as a variation on the “property-is-theft” theme. That kind of flag-waving can be counterproductive: why read a book if you know in advance what it’s likely to be arguing?

In this case, though, Kern offers up a mix of issues that richly deserve consideration, warning us about the supposed attractions of gentrification, and against the metaphors of organic growth and change that lace the writings of Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs.

Seen afresh, the language of urban development is uncomfortably close to that of eugenics when applied to ridding problem areas of undesirables (“weeds”—weak but cunning aliens, reproducing quickly and having no natural abode) and replacing them with a higher level of inhabitants (the cultivars that will put down roots, grow strong and make more inhabitable places).

Conventional planning relies on these survival-of-the-fittest principles and, as Kern says, “Darwin might be dismayed to find his careful observations … reduced to simplistic justifications for craven profiteering.”

The risk with biology-based metaphors, she adds, is that encouraging us to see a process as natural limits how we understand it and how free we feel to try and change it.

This is good because it invites us to consider land development in terms of occupation and displacement, and to look out for alternatives to the boosterism that sees speculative development as necessarily “the right ‘evolution’ for cities”.

ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS: ADVENTURES IN THE DOMINIONS

OWEN HATHERLEY

Watkins Media / Repeater, 345 pages, Softback, August 2022, 9781914420863, RRP £12.99

Kern’s observations about gentrification as a kind of colonisation are mirrored in Owen Hatherley’s Artificial Islands, a historical study of urban development in the British “Dominions”, except that Hatherley sees gentrification as not just testbeds for urban neoliberaism but “places where attempts at decolonisation have gone furthest”.

The artificial islands of his title are those one-time reconstructions of Britain in the outposts of Empire that became “Dominions” in the early 1900s and that Brexit campaigners heralded as more natural UK trading partners than Europe on grounds of long-standing kith-and-kinship.

What Hatherley wants to know is: how realistic is the idea (promoted by Dominic Cummings and others) that UK should attempt to reheat imperial unionism by entering a trading alliance with the “white” Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand—the so-called CANZUK alliance?

The question affords him a much-needed opportunity to revisit British imperialism, discovering what few of us in the UK know enough about: especially the extent to which indigenous populations were decimated for the sake of land (and in the name of social Darwinism) and the enthusiasm of the working movement and trade unions in wishing to deter Chinese and Indian immigration, policies he follows other historians in calling Labourism rather than Socialism but which could equally well be called national socialism.

What does this have to do with architecture and town planning? Read the book.

IF WALLS COULD SPEAK: MY LIFE IN ARCHITECTURE

MOSHE SAFDIE

Grove Press UK, 360 pages, Hardback, 6 October 2022, 9781611856576, RRP £25.00

If only the great architects of our times were also great writers. Gropius and Le Corbusier were role models in this regard, using language brilliantly, in parallel with their work. Moshe Safdie (1938), also a polemicist, tends to defend his ideas more quietly. In his new memoir, If Walls Could Speak, he sounds genial and older-statesmanlike—a far cry from the young firebrand whose student project, Habitat, at Expo 67 in Montréal, launched him with the same sort of bang with which Citizen Kane had launched the similarly precocious Orson Welles. Safdie’s new book is full of gentle reminiscence but also teaches us things. It introduces us to the communities that it takes to get a building built—not just those in the architectural office but owners, promoters, city councillors, mayors, engineers. It discusses the problems of running an architectural practice—how much to risk on a competition entry and how to distinguish between certainties and variables in any new scheme. And it recalls projects going wrong. It also documents the tensions in his life. He has oscillated between realising his patron’s ambitions and needing patrons to help him realise his own. He has also experienced the tensions of being a displaced Israeli, having visions for Israel’s future in the face if its myopeia and treacherous infighting while recognising the unmet needs of its Arab citizens and of Palestinian refugees

In one case, he says, and with the support of Israel’s then minister of transport, Shimon Peres, he tried to set up a factory to help build more housing in the West Bank, until stopped by the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, following failed peace talks with Israel’s neighbours.

“Such is the tragedy of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he writes. “The antagonists insist on all or nothing, and ‘nothing’ is the inevitable result.”

LAND OF STONE: A JOURNEY THROUGH MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN SCOTLAND

ROGER EMMERSON

Luath Press, 480 pages, Softback, 6 December 2022, 9781804250167, RRP £25.00

One way of thinking about Roger Emmerson’s Land of Stone is that it is a religious book, the religion being Scottishness and the possible encapsulation of Scottishness in the architecture of modern Scotland.

Such a phenomenon is not something the author was always convinced of, as he confesses in his Introduction, and especially scorned when post-Modernism in the 1990s tried to recycle Scottish motifs for its own polemic purposes. Besides, he does not wish to renounce his upbringing as a child of the Modern Movement.

But now, Emmerson wants to show that Scottishness is indeed possible, and this book—20 years in the making—takes us on his intellectual journey. What follows is a yoking together of all the evidence he feels necessary to make the case, starting with an exploration of how other countries—notably Czechoslovakia and Finland—grappled with the same question a century or so ago.

Fortunately, Emmerson starts out by explaining how his heavy paperback works and what it contains—fortunately because, on first inspection, it is a blizzard of references, quotations, names and dates (sometimes unnecessarily so: Alvar Aalto’s dates are given twice, Hugh MacDiarmid’s three times), occasionally reading like a set of lecture notes.

In addition, its method of argument is not entirely scientific, constructing each new section on the assumption that the previous section has been answered persuasively.

But like any religious work, it is at heart a work of passion, and rigorous argument is inevitably moulded to its agenda, which is to validate what international architecture has long denied and to show that, rather than simply copying Caledonian tropes, there is a solid set of ideas and values that informs—or could inform—a common architecture no less than it informs Scottish politics, all the while resisting the dark side of political nationalism.

Shortlisted: Reference Books

QUEER SPACES: AN ATLAS OF LGBTQIA+ PLACES AND STORIES

ADAM NATHANIEL FURMAN AND JOSHUA MARDELL (EDS)

RIBA Publishing, 240 pages, Hardback, 1 May 2022, 9781914124211, RRP £40.00

The notion behind Furman and Mardell’s Queer Spaces is that to be “queer” means denying aspects of oneself in order to fit in, which is burdensome, and therefore valuing places where no such self-denial is necessary, and designing places that symbolise visually that the space itself is queer or queer-friendly, where one can relax.

In view of Roger Emmerson’s long struggle to establish that a building can be identifiable as “Scottish”, it’s intriguing that the authors of Queer Spaces seem not to have had similar reservations—or at least, there’s no obvious questioning in this book of what they take to be the case: not just that the nearly 100 buildings illustrated here are queer but that the idea of “queer” can be meaningfully applied to buildings.

Such an idea might strike us as odd and invite us to ask whether architecture has the capacity to be defined in this way and, if it does, what the determinants might be. Is architectural queerness something fundamental that we know from Architectural History (the manipulation of space and light and rhythm etc etc) or—more radically— more to do with the apparent superficies of who the designers or occupants are and how they dressed the place?

The latter, presumably, because many of the spaces shown here are adaptations of pre-existing buildings—and queer culture highly values the art of dressing.

So this is not a book of theory but a treasury of case studies allowing readers to compare and contrast, and establish for themselves what these global examples have in common that marks them out as queer and not-queer.

HOUSE LONDON

ELLIE STATHAKI AND ANNA STATHAKI

Frances Lincoln Publishers, 256 pages, Hardback, 6 September 2022, 9780711267428, RRP £35.00

If queerness is identifiable in a home, as the previous book asks us to consider, then it ought to be possible to flick through Ellie and Anna Stathaki’s House London and identify which of its 50 stylish London interiors was designed by queer designers or for queer residents. Maybe one can: the main staircase in Danielle Moudaber’s SW3 Victorian townhouse looks as if it’s made out of whipped cream. Is it gay? Maybe. It’s certainly fun (and many of Furman and Mardell’s examples are way harder than that).

More obvious, though, is the monied uniformity in the London-only homes featured in the Stathakis’s coffee-table book—and who doesn’t like ogling at the rich? We’re talking “Utilitarian with a Minimalist Twist”, “A Nod to Pop Culture”, “Domestic Grandeur meets Mediterranean Blue”, “Revisiting Rococo”—all different but somehow all the same.

This is intriguing because it cuts across the internationalism of many of the owners and designers—Shalini Misra, Sarah Akigbogun, Sunita Kumar Nair, Michel Da Costa Gonçalves and others—and their influences and materials.

The authors quote as sources Memphis, Scandinavia, Shanghai (the Waterhouse Hotel) and Peter Zumthor in Switzerland, with furniture by Restoration Hardware in California and Kai Kristiansen in Denmark, and Iroko wood from Nigeria, and a balance of classic signature pieces (Eames chairs, Saarinen table) and objects by younger firms.

The Stathikis suggest that behind London’s indistinguishable facades, wildly different experiences await us but what they have actually demonstrated is the common culture of the well-heeled. It’s worthy of note for the aspriational among us.

A HISTORY OF COUNCIL HOUSING IN 100 ESTATES

JOHN BOUGHTON

RIBA Publishing, 272 pages, Hardback, 1 November 2022, 9781914124631, RRP £40.00

And so to public housing. It’s different. Chapter 6 of A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates shows just how. It quotes the sociologist Richard Hoggart saying of Hunslett Grange in Leeds, where he grew up, saying that it represented “some of the worst, most crass and inhumane public housing I have seen in any developed country”, and there are many who would say the same of a majority of the projects featured here.

The fascinating question is: what would it take for there to be a transformation in the perception of these estates? Such has been the horror of prefabricated concrete-panel high-rise that virtually any building before the First World War is now redeemed, however mean or unworthy it may have seemed previously. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings that the planners tried to demolish have been fought for by action groups and then—to refer back to Leslie Kern’s book—stolen for the rich.

If that’s the pattern, then it would require an even more loathsome architecture to make the housing estates of the 1960s appealing—or the complete absence of any new construction. (Could that possibly happen?) And so it takes a historian—in this case Liverpool University’s John Boughton, to ask questions that illustrate virtues not obvious to the naked eye.

The question we might throw back at him is: have residents liked some of these buildings because what they’d had before was worse or did they learn to value buildings by living in them? If the latter is the case, then we have a lot to learn, as a corrective to the fragile economy that pampers our privileged expectations. Boughton’s conclusions and his withholding of judgement is therefore important. Circumstances were everything, he suggests; few buildings were born bad.

BRUTAL OUTER LONDON: THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION OF MODERNIST ARCHITECTURE IN LONDON’S OUTER BOROUGHS

SIMON PHIPPS

September Publishing, 208 pages, Hardback, 27 October 2022, 9781914613166, RRP £20.00

Photographer Simon Phipps goes further than John Boughton in his photographic report on Outer London’s postwar monuments, and does not withhold judgement on our most challenging buildings. “I don’t like every one of the buildings I have photographed for this book,” he admits, “but within all of them there is something admirable and particular about their aesthetics.”

With supreme panache, Phipps illustrates his conviction by reference to The Rubble Club, a whimsical grouping for architects who have seen their buildings demolished in their own lifetime and which claimed twice-RIBA-president Owen Luder as one of its most celebrated members.

“In the 60s my buildings were rewarded,” Luder reflected in a 2010 documentary; “in the 70s they were applauded; in the 80s they were questioned; in the 90s they were ridiculed; and when we got through to the 2000s, the ones I like most are the ones that are being demolished!”

Phipps also quotes figures from Estate Watch to show that more than 100 of London’s council estates are now threatened with demolition—“crushed between the insidious repetition of what [influential 1950s architectural critic] Ian Nairn termed ‘subtopia’ and its contemporary equivalent.”

Photographic archives can prove unreliable and Phipps quotes two photographers adept at teasing out fine images from unpromising subjects. Although he offers up images himself, the clear message of his book is that buildings must at the very least be walked around and explored—as he does—in order to understand them. Brutal Outer London is therefore not just a blackand-white photographic record of a genre of architecture and a plea for the survival of new ways of living, it is also a record of the powerful conviction of this particular photographer.

THIS IS ARCHITECTURE: WRITING ON BUILDINGS

STEPHEN BAYLEY AND ROBERT BARGERY (EDS)

Unicorn, 112 pages, Hardback, 25 October 2022, 9781914414862, RRP £25.00

The Royal Fine Art Commission used to be a prominent national body, advising the government on whether new developments were in the public interest. It ran out of pep in the 1990s and was wound up in 1999, was then rolled into the newly established Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), and was finally merged into the Design Council in 2011.

The RFAC is survived by the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, a charity set up in 1987 to promote public appreciation of good design. In promoting its charitable objectives, it launched, in 2021, the Building Beauty Awards, giving the first of these to Lord Foster, Norman Foster, the most famous architect in the UK and its own president.

In like manner, it has now commissioned a book edited by its own chairman, Stephen Bayley, and its own executive director, Robert Bargery. Some guys get all the luck.

The point of their book is to show what good architectural talk looks like, because architects themselves are bad at it. To counter their technical sermonising to audiences of the converted, the editors have provided examples of writing by writers who have a detachment that those with skin in the game usually lack.

The result is a superb collection of over 90 historical snippets, which the editors commend as non-didactic but which they hope will stimulate the palate. Their choices are broadly insightful of changing values and approaches to architecture, and many were in fact meant to be didactic by their authors. Some were once uplifting (though less so now) but, paradoxically, many of the most engaging examples are in fact sceptical: de Maupassant on the Eiffel Tower; Tom Wolfe on the Seagram Building, W.G. Sebald on the Bilbiothèque Nationale; Reyner Banham on the History Faculty, Cambridge.

And although the editors invite readers to make their own connections between these chance quotations, the doubters make the more reverential look prim.

All is not sweetness and light in architectural commentary. Well worth dipping into, though.

Shortlisted: History

GILDED CITY: TOUR MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE LONDON

DUNCAN A. SMITH

Unicorn, 160 pages, Hardback, 1 July 2022, 9781914414848, RRP £25.00

Duncan A. Smith is an urban geographer at UCL where he studies cities from a multi-disciplinary perspective. His Gilded City offers seven walking tours of the City of London and its surrounds, and one of the City of Westminster, taking in the oldest surviving relics from Roman London and stretching to the completion of St Paul’s Cathedral 1,700 years later.

The core of London’s importance, he points out, was its positioning as the gateway to Europe (not much hope of that any more) and the focus for international sea links beinging new ideas, new faiths and new peoples to our shores (ditto).

Westminster was always the preserve of crown and church, which tended to lock the population into a rigid hierarchy. The City of London, by contrast, offered social mobility that enabled individuals the “chance to break free of fixed social roles” by entry into an apprenticeship or a scholarship to a London school.

Given the destruction suffered by London’s fires, Victorian slum clearance, German bombing and post-war redevelopment, it is a marvel that anything still remains of its physical history, but Gilded City is an excellent introduction, with helpful maps and a wealth of colour photos.

In addition to encouraging us to experience London’s history for ourselves, Smith argues for the surviving buildings and their urban context to be preserved and enhanced. Of course. He adds that London has a long history as a dynamic and creative city, with a built environment that has played a part in this dynamism. The irony, however, is that dynamism and creativity are not consonant with preservation, both of which have to operate in islands of freedom far less constrained than the areas we conserve.

BUILT IN CHELSEA: TWO MILLENNIA OF ARCHITECTURE AND TOWNSCAPE

DAN CRUICKSHANK

Unicorn, 312 pages, Softback, 21 February 2022, 9781911604969, RRP £30.00

According to the architecture critic Ian Nairn, Chelsea during the Swinging 1960s was an undistinguished place to host a rebellion in clothes and music—“full of idiosyncratic life … yet without anything in the buildings to express it”.

Postwar London was down at heel and it was precisely Chelsea’s decay and neglect that made it affordable for young entrepreneurs like Mary Quant, who had opened her boutique in King’s Road as early as 1955.

Since Nairn’s time, research and scholarship and commitment to architectural history have enabled us to see Chelsea more enthusiastically—assisting its progress as an example of the gentrification highlighted in Leslie Kern’s book (see page 6)—and no one is better placed to illustrate this than Dan Cruickshank, a former news editor at the Architects’ Journal.

Built in Chelsea is Cruickshank’s masterful account of Chelsea’s rise as a rural up-Thames retreat for the wealthy from the dirt and intrigue of London. Here, says the antiquary John Aubrey, “Sir John Danvers, of Chelsey, … first taught us the way of Italian gardens” in the mid-16th-century, much of Chelsea’s land having been acquired from 1524 by Henry VIII’s Lord High Chancellor of England Thomas More, author of Utopia (1516) and an enthusiast of the Northern Renaissance.

Valuing Chelsea requires our knowing Chelsea intimately and Cruickshank does so, bringing to life both the architectural details and those responsible for them, such as the extraordinary Syrie, who divorced the pharma-tycoon Henry Wellcome to marry W. Somerset Maugham, father of her love child.

SW3 will be Cruickshank’s beneficiary, especially via the intercessions of the Chelsea Society, to which the book seems to be dedicated, even if not explicitly so.

MASTER OF THE HOUSE: THE THEATRES OF CAMERON MACKINTOSH

MICHAEL COVENEY/ DELFONT MACKINTOSH THEATRES

Unicorn, 320 pages, Hardback, 11 October 2022, 9781914414831, RRP £40.00

In This is Architecture (see page 8), Stephen Bayley and Robert Bargery suggested that some of the brightest writing on architecture comes from architectural outsiders. A fine illustration of this idea is Master of the House, a study of eight London theatres owned by the impresario Cameron Mackintosh.

Mackintosh evidently contributed to the content (his company gets equal billing) but the credited author is Michael Coveney, in his time theatre critic for the Financial Times, the Observer and the Daily Mail and biographer of Ken Campbell (David Bowie’s inspiration), Maggie Smith, Mike Leigh and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Master of the House is a homage to Mackintosh—although the title is also a tilt to the eight theatres’ original architects and patrons—and begins with a piece of unabashed veneration, stating that how Mackintosh, “the world’s leading producer, also became the West End’s most successful and committed theatre owner … is one of the greatest stories ever told in London theatreland.”

And why not? This is showbiz. And to its credit, this plush large-format volume lives up to its hype. There’s enough background on the buildings to satisfy the most discerning architect (especially for anyone wanting to know what went into modernising the various theatres’ lighting and ventilation systems) while introducing the full cast of characters who gave the buildings life— something that architectural writers are often too puritanical to address.

Coveney’s bibliography is just the right length and, significantly, he thanks for their help Nick Thompson and Clare Ferraby (who refurbished the Nottingham Theatre Royal), Julian Middleton, whose team restored Matcham’s Victoria Palace Theatre, theatre design consultants Richard Pilbrow and Iain Mackintosh, Rupert Rhyme, vice-president of the Frank Matcham Society, and an army of craftspeople and contractors, from marble floor installers to specialists in ornate plaster. We like books that get their hands dirty.

THE ARCHITECTURE DRAWING BOOK: RIBA COLLECTIONS

CHARLES HIND, FIONA ORSINI, SUSAN PUGH

RIBA Publishing, 240 pages, Hardback, 1 November 2022, 9781859469491, RRP £45.00

The RIBA’s book about its own collection of drawings is overwhelming: is it just a random selection of some of the wonders the RIBA has collected in the last 200 years or is there—as you would expect of architects—a plan? Unsurprisingly there is, but it’s not easily guessed. The RIBA collects evidence of the whole process of building and the various sections of the book gather examples of each chronological stage—though not, sadly, in respect of any particular building, so we don’t see specific projects coming to fruition.

Jill Lever and Margaret Richardson had written a fuller introduction to drawings and their purposes in 1984 but, astonishingly, the present work—by the Collection’s three current curators—is the first attempt at a history of the Collection itself, and draws heavily on published and unpublished writings by earlier curators, of whom Lever and Richardson were two.

Astonishingly, also, the book is a highly disciplined work, limiting its commentaries on each illustration to a maximum of 200 words. That takes quite a deal of concision.

Form ought to follow function but whether the structure of the book is as revealing as it means to be is uncertain. It might be more a parading of trophies than an academic work, although its ambiguities are fully signposted. Section 5—“Study Sketches”—aims to show how third parties have drawn buildings designed by others (although who actually rendered many of the drawings shown here and credited to a major architect is not investigated) and how architects have drawn buildings (something no one does any more) in order to understand them better. As the authors say, it is hard to find a perfect title for this section, just as it was hard to generalise about working drawings in the previous one.

One is left wanting more—but that’s good, and this will be a valuable roadmap for future explorers.

CARLO SCARPA AND CASTELVECCHIO REVISITED

RICHARD MURPHY

Breakfast Mission Publishing, 384 pages, Softback, 16 October 2017, 9781527208902, RRP £79.65

This book, published in 2017, predates the start date for this year’s Architectural Book Awards but was accepted by the judges on the grounds that it is in fact part of a 30-year project. It concerns Castelvecchio, a 14thcentury castle built on the Adige river in Verona, which was damaged by Napoleon’s troops in the late 1790s and again by Hitler’s army as it retreated in 1945.

The point of interest in it, for Murphy, is the extensive restoration work done by Carlo Scarpa (1906–1978), a Venetian architect, not universally admired by British architects, who developed an approach that is now standard in building conservation of revealing the old and adding what was new and necessary, rather than trying to fake the building’s original appearance, an approach that is now standard in building conservation.

Murphy surveyed and drew the building in 1986, helped first by three Edinburgh University students and then by a whole army of them, intrigued by Scarpa’s treatment of the building on and off between 1957 and 1975. He published a first study in 1990; the present volume is a massively enlarged revision of that work, looking alternately at elements in Scarpa’s work (paving and fountains, the north façade, the east façade, the bridge across the moat) and then—like the RIBA curators in the previous book—at the way in which Scarpa used drawings (almost 900 of which have survived) to think about those elements.

Some readers might find that Murphy stands too close to what he’s viewing: that the intensity of his visual examination leaves no space to step back and engage in broader thinking. For that, a historian is necessary and here Murphy presses into service Ken Frampton, an adept at seeing the wood for the trees, though even Frampton’s one-page Foreword leaves one breathless.

That said, there’s no doubt that this is an exceptional piece of documentation and it is hard to see how it will ever be bettered. Richard MacCormac, Murphy’s lieber Meister from the 1980s, would have approved.

ICONICON: A JOURNEY AROUND THE LANDMARK BUILDINGS OF CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN

JOHN GRINDROD

Faber & Faber, 496 pages, Hardback, 3 March 2022, 9780571348138, RRP £20.00

Booklaunch is based in London (our domain is booklaunch.london) and our perspective is inevitably skewed to the metropolis—not unreasonably; Londoners account for 13 percent of the UK’s population, making us a small country as much as a conurbation.

It is welcome, then, when a writer looks at what we’re already familiar with from a different perspective. John Grindrod starts his comprehensive survey of 20th-century British architecture from Glasgow, quoting two TV documentaries about the city that enable him to reflect on urban ideas that planners aspired to in the 1970s and then gave up aspiring to in the 1980s.

It’s a strong start and sets a tone of inquiry that he keeps up for all of this book’s near 500 pages: not that of the critic but the flâneur: a Tony Parsons, perhaps, or, classically, the now venerable Hunter Davies, who invented the genre of super-informed, super-informal writing for the then new medium of Sunday colour magazines and who remains the only authorised biographer of the Beatles. Grindrod talks the way insightful cool people talk when they’re outwitting laboured academics but he can do the architectural stuff too.

He has already written in Concretopia about his journey around postwar British reconstruction and in Outskirts about his exploration of suburban green belts. Now, in his cleverly titled book, Iconicon (a lexicon of icons), he trashes the architect’s cliché of what an icon means—monuments that represent “nothing more than themselves with a kind of dumb confidence”—and looks at what is really iconic, even if prosaic: estates of pseudo-Georgian houses, campuses of fibreglass shed and surface car parks, town-centre office blocks cum micro-flats”. That’s better: someone who actually looks and sees—and is surprised. It’s such a relief.