Includes bibliographical references (pages 693-719) and index

The idea of a modern architecture in the nineteenth century -- Industrialization and the city: the skyscraper as type and symbol -- The search for new forms and the problem of ornament -- Rationalism, the engineering tradition and reinforced concrete -- Arts and crafts ideals in Britain and the U.S.A. -- Responses to mechanization: the Deutscher Werkbund and futurism -- The architectural system of Frank Lloyd Wright -- National myths and classical transformations -- Cubism, de Stijl and new conceptions of space -- Le Corbusier's quest for ideal form -- Walter Gropius, German expressionism and the Bauhaus -- Architecture and revolution in Russia -- Skyscraper and suburb: the U.S.A. between the wars -- The ideal community: alternatives to the industrial city -- The international style, the individual talent and the myth of functionalism -- The image and idea of Le Corbusier's Villa savoye at Poissy -- The continuity of older traditions -- Nature and the machine: Mies Van Der Rohe, Wright and Le Corbusier in the 1930s -- The spread of modern architecture to Britain and Scandinavia -- Totalitarian critiques of the modern movement -- International, national, regional: the diversity of a new tradition -- Modern architecture in the U.S.A.: immigration and consolidation -- Form and meaning in the late works of Le Corbusier -- The Unit©♭ d'habitation at Marseilles as a collective housing prototype -- Alvar Aalto and Scandinavian developments -- Disjunctions and continuities in the Europe of the 1950s -- The process of absorption: Latin America, Australia, Japan -- On monuments and monumentality: Louis I. Kahn -- Architecture and anti-architecture in Britain -- Extension and critique in the 1960s -- Modernity, tradition and identity in the developing world -- Pluralism in the 1970s -- Modern architecture and memory: new perceptions of the past -- The universal and the local: landscape, climate and culture -- Technology, abstraction and ideas of nature

A survey of twentieth-century architecture, tracing the origins of the modern forms of architecture; looking at the crystallization of modern architecture between the wars; examining the global dissemination of modern architecture between the 1940s and the 1970s; and discussing the development of world architecture since 1980