Books: Lost Buildings

Lost Buildings is a direct appeal to the heart-strings, a heady dose of architectural nostalgia at a time when the shock of the new sends us endlessly reeling.

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With the subtitle 'demolished, destroyed, imagined, reborn,' the net is cast far and wide, starting with the vanished cities and palaces of long lost civilisations. But it's not until Glancey focuses on the scoured cityscapes of the modern era that the book really gets into its stride, and the emotive kick of bomb-ravaged Europe or the politically motivated urban scourings of modernism uncovering many lost treasures.

The separate section on the architecture of the imagination is fascinating, but slightly less relevant. Arguably, the great architectural spaces of fiction are only 'lost' once some poor art director or set designer takes it upon themselves to impose their vision of these imaginary spaces on the world, thus depriving the rest of us of our mental landscapes. This is certainly true of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, which has particularly ill-served by small screen adaptations.

That said, Lost Buildings is an excellent visual source, and a timely reminder that the rendered images of tomorrow's architectural fantasies might one day have crumbled into very real ruins.

21 October 2008 | Architecture