For those of us who spend any of our time trying to sift, characterise, or otherwise make sense of the architecture of the recent past, this succinct account of the last six decades is a welcome addition to the spot on the bookcase marked ‘The Big Picture’. What it may lack in context it more than makes up for in the kind of enjoyably broad sweep that makes some of the key works of architectural history such a good read – let’s face it, they aren’t always that. But the key works of Frampton, Giedion, and William Curtis – all of whom attempted to survey the modern period from a distance – are the progenitors of this highly readable account of what happened after modernism, and it’s a decent stab at settling into some kind of position the disparate and worldwide fracturing of the modern project.

The history of modernism has long been an account, on the one hand, of how far back we trace its beginnings and, on the other, what the reactions of discontented architects were in the post-war period. As much as enquiries into the chief exponents of the international style of the interwar period, these two areas have drawn considerable academic attention, and this book takes the logical next step and tries to answer what happened to the discontents and those architects who followed them.

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