William Whyte
Dreaming in Concrete
Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances: Finding a Home in the Ruins of Modernism
By Owen Hatherley
Verso 336pp £18.99
Mass Housing: Modern Architecture and State Power – a Global History
By Miles Glendinning
Bloomsbury 576pp £27.99
It is nearly a century since Le Corbusier published Vers une architecture, a battle cry for modernism that would variously inspire and enrage readers for years to come. And it is more than five decades since the collapse of the east London tower block Ronan Point that was widely believed to mark the end of the modern movement in Britain.
Modern architecture isn’t all that modern any more. At least two generations of architectural historians have grown up who didn’t experience the heady excitement of seeing these edifices of concrete and steel when they were new – or even nearly new. Yet if modern architecture now seems a little like ancient history, we are still far from clear what it was when it was a going concern. What was it that united the stripped-down, plate-glass purity of Mies van der Rohe and the monolithic concrete monumentalism of Louis Kahn? What, if anything, could be the meeting point between the mass-produced Soviet housing of the 1960s and the bespoke luxury of all those white-painted, tinted-glass homes in Beverly Hills?
Trying to make sense of this protean phenomenon, modernism’s staunchest supporters and its fiercest opponents alike have taken to words – lots of words. It’s telling that the pioneers of the modern movement wrote so much. In an influential article, the architectural historian Sarah Williams Goldhagen once argued that modernism
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm