When preparation for the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) + Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Architecture Gallery was underway about 25 years ago, external consultation was carried out with a variety of different audiences to determine which architectural subjects potential visitors wanted to see represented in what was then the UK’s first permanent architecture gallery.

From the mid-nineteenth century, successful artists gravitated to studio houses in prosperous Chelsea and Kensington. The less affluent artists tended to work in left-over industrial spaces in the more insalubrious parts of town. In the 1860s, when Hampstead became part of the suburban railway system and joined up with the city, some less-established artists began to move to Belsize Park, down-hill from Hampstead village, where earlier generations of artists including Constable, had lived and worked.

Through this short article, Atarah Adams, our 2022-2023 MA scholar, shares her experiences from her Master’s in Conservation of the Built Environment at Birmingham City University.

As a leading critic of the theory and praxis of mainstream post-war architecture, Christopher Alexander’s place in the history of design theory is clearly unconventional. As such, any recollection of his extensive career and influence must fall outside of the typical architectural obituary which tends to a) focus on the most iconic structures they designed and b) place them within an art-historical ‘arc’ narrative.

Florida-based architectural historian Tamara Morgenstern - one of the contributors to ‘The New History of the American Renaissance’ - recounts the steps that led her from the shores of Lake Worth to the pages of Architectural History.

If architectural history books play a significant role in convening the culture, norms, and values of the architectural discipline to newcomers, then how they teach where we find feminism; from whom we find feminism matters.

Recent discussion on Coventry’s iconic town centre have highlighted the vulnerability of the architectural - and landscape architectural heritage of the post-war period. In this final post of the series Luca Csepely-Knorr and Karen Fitzsimon highlight a few examples that have already gone, have been altered irreversibly or are under threat to be lost.

In her new book, Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture, Grace Ong Yan discusses the evolution of architectural branding in mid-twentieth century America. Through in-depth case studies, she demonstrates how clients and architects together crafted buildings to reflect their company’s brand, carefully considering consumers’ perception and their emotions towards the architecture and the messages they communicated.