Twentieth Century Architects and Victorian Architects, published by various authors beginning in 2009. RIBA Books/Liverpool University Press/Historic England, $34.
For me, the Twentieth Century Architects series of short, illustrated biographies is the most useful and straightforwardly enjoyable endeavor in architectural history since the Buildings of England, the multivolume life’s work of the German-Jewish émigré art historian Nikolaus Pevsner. Like Pevsner’s tomes, which, from the 1950s through the 1980s, catalogued English architecture county by county, these monographs—assembled under the aegis of the campaigning group the Twentieth Century Society (usually C20, for short)—are accessible without being patronizing, comprehensive without being academic, visually rich without being “coffee table”: exemplary projects of popular education. As Britain’s public arts bodies have been shredded by fifteen years of austerity, the C20 books have hopped from publisher to publisher and from backer to backer and are now put out by Liverpool University…