Jonathan Glancey

This is a brand new edition of the visually stunning and lavishly produced guide to the great buildings and structures of the modern age from around the world. Divided into eight clear sections, each movement in architecture from 1900 to the present day is represented: Arts and Crafts, Classicism, Organic, Modernism, Postmodernism, Robotic, Cities, and Futures. Focusing on one building per page, Jonathan Glancey discusses over 440 landmark structures from those now regarded as classics of modern architecture, such as L'Institut du Monde Arab in Paris and the Sydney Opera House, to recent buildings such as the Swiss Re building in London and the Parliamentary Library in New Delhi.

Bread and circuses-free food and mass entertainment-was the name contemporary social observers gave to the ancient Roman practice of keeping the common people happy and rebellion-free. Jonathan Glancey, in this personal and passionate essay about the city he loves, suggests that the same unformulated policy is the means by which modern London's citizens are kept as apolitical and passively pleasure-loving as possible. But shops, restaurants and a few gorgeous buildings are, he maintains, a poor substitute for a creaking infrastructure, and London's cachet as a boisterously creative but well-run city will plummet if private vice is allowed to triumph over public virtue.