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The English architects Alison Smithson (1928-1993) and Peter Smithson (1923-2003) were ringleaders of the New Brutalism, active in CIAM and Team 10, and influential in English Pop Art. The Smithsons, who met as architecture students, built only a few buildings but wrote prolifically throughout their career, leaving a body of writings that consider issues in architecture and urbanism and also take up subjects that are "not quite architecture" (the name of a series of articles written by Alison Smithson for the Architects´ Journal) - including fashion design, graphic communication, and children´s tales. In this book, M. Christine Boyer explores the Smithsons´ writings - books, articles, lectures, unpublished manuscripts, and private papers. She focuses on unpublished material, reading the letter, the scribbled note, the undelivered lecture, the scrapbook, the "magic box," as words in the language of modern architectural history - especially that of postwar England, where the Smithsons and other architects were at the center of the richest possible range of cultural encounters. Boyer is "writing around" the Smithsons´ work by considering the cultural contexts in which they formed and wrote about their ideas.

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M. Christine Boyer is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in the School of Architecture at Princeton University aand the author of Dreaming the Rational City, The City of Collective Memory (both published by the MIT Press), Le Corbusier: Homme de Lettres, and other books.

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