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Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession
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About Four Walls And A Roof: The Complex Nature Of A
Product Description A Financial Times Best Book of the YearA Guardian Best Architecture Book of the Year“Sharp, revealing, funny.”―The Guardian“An original and even occasionally hilarious book about losing ideals and finding them again… [De Graaf] deftly shows that architecture cannot be better or more pure than the flawed humans who make it.”―The EconomistArchitecture, we like to believe, is an elevated art form that shapes the world as it pleases. Four Walls and a Roof turns this fiction on its head, offering a candid account of what it’s really like to work as an architect. Drawing on his own tragicomic experiences in the field, Reinier de Graaf reveals the world of contemporary architecture in vivid snapshots: from the corridors of wealth in London, Moscow, and Dubai to the demolished hopes of postwar social housing in New York and St. Louis. We meet ambitious oligarchs, developers for whom architecture is nothing more than an investment, and layers of bureaucrats, consultants, and mysterious hangers-on who lie between any architect’s idea and the chance of its execution.“This is a book about power, money and influence, and architecture’s complete lack of any of them… Witty, insightful and funny, it is a (sometimes painful) dissection of a profession that thinks it is still in control.”―Financial Times“This is the most stimulating book on architecture and its practice that I have read for years.”―Architects’ Journal Review “Something of a revelation…[De Graaf] has produced an original and even occasionally hilarious book about losing ideals and finding them again…He deftly shows that architecture cannot be better or more pure than the flawed humans who make it.” ― The Economist “[It] tells the stories that tend to get left out of official histories, but which actually shape our physical environment…De Graaf’s book is sharp, revealing, funny, drily passionate and not always encouraging.” ― Rowan Moore , The Guardian “This is a book about power, money and influence, and architecture’s complete lack of any of them. It is a book not about architecture’s successes but about its failures. Witty, insightful and funny, it is a (sometimes painful) dissection of a profession that thinks it is still in control.” ― Edwin Heathcote , Financial Times “De Graaf is an excellent, witty and perceptive essayist. The heart of the book is a series of astonishing accounts of the protracted―and as it turns out, all doomed―sagas to get big urban projects approved and built in London (just pre-crash), Moscow (just pre-Putin), the Emirates (just pre-oil slump), and Kurdistan (just pre-Isis). The way de Graaf builds up to each (in hindsight) inevitable disappointment is masterly…He emerges as an unlikely, deeply skeptical architectural Everyman.” ― Hugh Pearman , The Spectator “This is the most stimulating book on architecture and its practice that I have read for years. Not only is de Graaf a good anecdotalist (his hilarious account of a long-winded and fruitless masterplanning competition in Russia should be turned into a film), but a perceptive analyst of how architecture represents, or connects with, wider political and economic movements and trends.” ― Paul Finch , Architects’ Journal “Takes an idiosyncratic look at architectural history and dissects contemporary practice―from the quotidian (and sometimes comic) frustrations to the occasional triumphs and memorable failures.” ― Josephine Minutillo , Architectural Record “Provocative…De Graaf has no fixed method. But the impressive extent and depth of his knowledge persistently inform his meditations, which take in many subjects. His mood is invariable. He is constantly and exhilaratingly cynical…Because he displays such candor―albeit polished candor, and such a perfectly gauged lack of tact―it is easy to forget that de Graaf is an architect, an insider, part of the system he dissects…De Graaf is likely to remain an architect for decades to come. In those circumstances, his enth
