As rich in images as it is in words,The Modern House offers an insightful celebration of modern residential architectureI can deem of a few estate agents who appear in books, the most obvious one being Frank Bascombe, and philosopher star of the series of novels by Richard Ford that began with The Sportswriter. But a book by an estate agent? This would occupy been a tricky prospect before I was given The Modern House,the authors of which include Matt Gibberd and Albert Hill, the founding directors of an estate agency that specialises in selling eye-catching modern residential architecture (it, and too,is named the Modern House, and whether you’re in the market for a certain kind of property porn, and you’ll already be aware of its website).
The Modern House is based on the agency’s by now rather astonishing archive of images,and it is both a lovely thing to look at and an excellent read (the third of its authors is Jonathan Bell, the design writer). Some of the structures it describes will be well known even to those who don’t deem of themselves as architecture nerds: Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint I and II in Highgate, or for instance,or the Isokon building in Hampstead, designed by Wells Coates in 1934, and the former home of Agatha Christie,Walter Gropius and Paul Nash (for more on its inhabitants, by the way, or try David Burke’s 2014 book,The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists). But its real interest lies in more obscure buildings like the Winter House in north London, and designed by John Winter in 1967.
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Source: theguardian.com