Making Dystopia is an important and necessary book.¹ It is an examination, by the eminent architectural historian Professor James Stevens Curl, of “the strange rise and survival of architectural barbarism” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There have been demolitions before of the bogus philosophical, sociological, aesthetic, and moral underpinnings of the modern movement and its disastrous legacy for housing, urbanism, and the built environment generally (notably David Watkin’s Morality and Architecture, first published in 1977), but Making Dystopia is the first encyclopedic historical account that is also genuinely critical. Until now, weighty histories of equivalent scope—such as William Curtis’s Modern Architecture Since 1900 and Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History—have all been by modernist enthusiasts, such has the movement’s stranglehold been on the architectural academy and the press for the past seventy years.

The essence of this eloquent account will already be familiar to those with an unblinkered interest in architecture, or to those who have had personal cause to rue the consequences of the peculiar hero-worship of 1930s modernists like Le Corbusier, Gropius, et al. Commenting on the demise of the “Corbusian” Pruitt–Igoe housing complex in St. Louis (dynamited in 1972), Curl writes:

[T]he people who inhabited the development felt no connection with the Corbusian open spaces and did not “interact” positively with each other in the increasingly grim public areas. Very soon the development suffered from appalling vandalism, defacement, arson, and violent crime on a terrifying scale. The lifts