• A definitive account of the most innovative and most influential 150 years in the history of architecture
• A work that brings scholarship in English into line with the most advanced continental research
• Over 300 photographs, architects’ drawings and plans
• Authoritative, readable, deeply considered
• The fruit of a lifetime’s study

Once in every generation comes a scholar who is a master of both the documentary evidence and the buildings themselves. Such a man is Christoph Luitpold Frommel who, after winning a world-wide reputation, here distils his learning into a new synthesis that is both up-to-date and securely based on primary sources.

The book is not only illustrated throughout with photographs, drawings, plans and reconstructions, but social context, technical innovation and aesthetic judgement are all given due weight, with particular emphasis on the way in which each architect balanced individual inspiration with the accepted canon.

Christoph Luitpold Frommel was born in 1933 and has held academic posts in Germany (Bonn University), the USA (Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, and the University of California, Berkeley) and Italy (La Sapienza, Rome). He was Director of the Bibliotheca Herziana, Rome, from 1980 to 2001.