ICONICON: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings

An enthralling journey around the Britain we have created since 1980. Wimpey homes, Millennium monuments, riverside flats, wind farms, spectacular skyscrapers, city centre apartments, out-of-town malls. Here are the horrors and delights, triumphs and failures from space age tower blocks to suburban business parks, and from postmodernist exuberance to Passivhaus eco-efficiency. Iconicon is at once a revelatory architectural grand tour, and an endlessly witty and engaging piece of social history. Encyclopaedic, funny and often cutting, Grindrod has written a love letter to contemporary buildings in his punchy polemic about our accidental urban landscape. Thrown together entirely for financial or political gain without any thought for aesthetic or social value, here are the visions of a few top architects, and a larger generation of young architects who wish to improve life for whole communities, not just the rich and powerful. It really makes us look at those big shiny funny shaped public buildings with a new eye and Grindrod's chirpy prose style is full of pop references as he chronicles the accelerating decline of the UK since 1980, the sprawl and the disaster of the Grenfell fire. The book is perfectly aimed at those in power. 486 big chunky pages, some illus. and stickered.