Lost Futures: The Disappearing Architecture of Post-War Britain

🔖 Rebuilding Britain after World War II and through the post-austerity decades of the 1960s and 1970s enabled architecture to embody a vision of a better future - both social and technological. The work of such practitioners as Erno Goldfinger, James Stirling, Alison and Peter Smithson, Team 4, Ahrends, Burton & Koralek and Lyons, Israel & Ellis, on many types of building across the country, was captured by equally radical photographers, providing a record of a time when a belief in progress underlay innovation in design.This book documents thirty-five buildings dating from 1945 to 1979, all of them significant both architecturally and through the ideas they represented. Most have been either demolished or fundamentally altered; the rest face imminent demolition or alteration. Owen Hopkins examines the complex social, economic, political and cultural contexts in which they were built and in which their eventual destruction could be seen as inevitable and even welcome.