Making Dystopia

An important and necessary book... Professor Curl has dug behind and chiseled away at the details of a history veneered over by decades of received modernist mythmaking. (Graham Cunningham, The New Criterion)

Curl's magnum opus... a polemical, but deeply scholarly, history of architectural modernism, its antecedents and its results. (Anthony Daniels, Quadrant)

Excellent book... Prof. Curl traces the history of dystopian modernism from its origins in the early 20th century up to the present day, giving numerous examples of its horrendous consequences. But Curl's book is not merely a lament... he makes some important suggestions for reforming the syllabus in schools of architecture so as to lay the basis for a better built environment in the future. It is to be hoped that his message will be heeded, as much is at stake here for the future of our civilisation. (Christopher McIntosh, GoodReads)

Anyone interested in the ideological foundations, as well as effects, of architectural modernism should read James Stevens Curl's recently published Making Dystopia... a magisterial and to me unanswerable account of one of the greatest aesthetic disasters to have befallen Europe in all its history (Theodore Dalrymple, takimag.com)

Stevens Curl gets his teeth into "the disaster that has been post-1945 British architecture and town planning", tackling the thorny subject with verve, wit and tremendous erudition... This great book, in showing categorically, and cogently, what went wrong, makes an unarguable case for the conservation of the little that remains. (Patricia Craig, The Times Literary Supplement)

... an essential, uncompromising, learned ... critique of one of the worst and most significant legacies of the 20th century (Anthony Daniels, The Jackdaw)

Written with passion and eloquence, Making Dystopia is a work of rare intellectual magnitude, to be recognized as an important ... contribution to the culture of our times. It promises to become essential reading to students of architecture... (Giovanna L Costantini, Leonardo)

An impassioned but informed case... meticulously researched and convincingly argued: it is an undoubtedly controversial book that empties out the contents of modernism for all to see and holds them up to the light for judgement... This book is a must-read for students of architecture: a contentious, highly thought-provoking study... (Patrick O'Keeffe, Architecture Today)

Curl, a veteran architectural historian with a string of big books to his name, certainly tells us what he thinks... (Richard Morrison, The Times)

Whatever you may think of its argument, this book's scholarship is precise. (Clive Aslet, Country Life)