Eighty seven housing projects spanning almost a hundred years. Described in the book’s title as an atlas, for me, at least, it more resembles a gazetteer, an invitation to visit schemes, to refresh one’s understanding and appreciation of familiar projects, or discover and learn from ones of which one had no prior knowledge.

Information – words and images – on twentieth century housing is everywhere  – on Wikipedia, on Pinterest, in academic journals and on specialist websites. And how extraordinarily lucky we are today to be able to fly at whim around projects on Google Earth. But this is information that is unfiltered and unrelated. The virtue of a work such as the ‘Housing Atlas Europe 20^th Century’ is that it is at once selective and comparative.

Firstly it identifies – no doubt following much debate between its four authors  – a succession of key projects carried out over the course of the last century. In some senses this could be interpreted as setting out a canon, enumerating those projects deemed to be exceptional, a designation they certainly deserve. But it would be more accurate, as indeed the authors explain, to see the chosen projects rather as representing the spectrum of approaches taken to the design of housing during the century in question.

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