Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How do countries acquire their distinctive features and appearance, their look or style? In this stimulating book, Jules Lubbock answers this question by focusing on Britain, with its characteristic terraced houses, Georgian squares, postwar slab blocks, and Victorian floral ornamentation. Lubbock traces the fierce debates over consumerism, good design, and town planning that have raged in Britain since the Elizabethan period, investigating how the design of buildings and possessions-domestic as well as official-becomes an issue of public policy and controversy.

Lubbock discusses the ideas, policies, and motivations of designers and commentators from 1550 to the present, including such figures as Charles I, Inigo Jones, Joseph Addison, Pope, Hogarth, Pugin, Dickens, Ruskin, and Le Corbusier. He describes the growing public awareness that taste and beauty are related to economic growth, that there is what he calls a political economy of design. He shows, for example, that London was shaped by a desire to control its expansion in order to maintain social stability in the face of the developing industrial and commercial revolution; that Puritans believed that the high consumption of luxury goods essential to prosperity could be made morally acceptable through good design; and that the court of James I consciously adopted classicism as the appropriate style for the newly joined kingdoms of England and Scotland. Lubbock shows the different ways in which architecture, design, planning, and style were believed to contribute to a "Good Society." He suggests that the political economy of design was not only viable in the past but can also provide an essential framework for the future.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

How tyrannical was the rule of taste in architecture and design in Britain after the 16th century? In this long and ambitious book, Lubbock (Univ. of Essex) attempts an answer by showing how political leaders, economic theorists, and writers on aesthetics sought to impose order on the production and consumption of goods. He discusses London as the focus of a consumer society, the debate over luxury items, the effects of the Industrial Revolution, and modern ideas about town planning and the uses of leisure time. Familiar names appear, such as Pugin and Ruskin, while the influence of less famous figures such as Bernard de Mandeville and Adolf Loos is also examined. Overall, Lubbock provides a provocative and thoughtful analysis of a complex subject. There are 120 adequate photographs, less than a dozen of which are color. The lack of a bibliography is a serious omission in a scholarly book of this type, but there are extensive and helpful endnotes. In short, a book for research libraries and schools with design programs. Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; faculty. W. S. Rodner; Tidewater Community College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Jules Lubbock is lecturer in art history and theory at the University of Essex.