Le Corbusier on Camera: The Unknown Films of Ernest Weissmann (Birkhaüser, 2024) is based on amateur films, shot by the architect Ernest Weissmann (1903-1985) with a Pathé Motocamera in the years 1929-1933 at, among other places, the Atelier Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. These films capture moments from Le Corbusier's life that have never been seen before. It also documents his friendships with Pierre Jeanneret, Josep Lluís Sert, Charlotte Perriand, Norman Rice, Kunio Maekawa, Sigfried Giedion and others.

Across six chapters, the book shows impressive stills from these films and places them in the respective historical and personal context of Le Corbusier in introductory texts. Two introductions are devoted to the history of these pioneering amateur films and to Ernest Weissmann's life and his life-long relationship with Le Corbusier.

Veronique Boone is an architect from the University of Ghent, Belgium and doctor from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Lille (ENSAPL), France and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. She is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta at the ULB. She lectures on architectural history and theory as well as on the conservation of 20th-century architecture. Her research focuses on the history and theory, as well as the construction history, of modern architecture. She has published extensively in academic publications on Le Corbusier and the mediation of architecture by film and television, and is a correspondant for Belgian and international architectural magazines on contemporary architecture. She has worked on several exhibitions as curator and/or contributor to catalogues – among them, Lucien Hervé, l’oeil de l’architecte, CIVA, 2005; Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography, Musée des beaux-arts La Chaux-de-Fonds, 2012; L’Architecture modern à l’écran, Cinematek, 2014; In the Studio at 35, rue de Sèvres: an Amateur cameraman’s Informal View, Fondation Le Corbusier, 2017 and Atelier Jespers, 2018. She is also Vice-President of DOCOMOMO Belgium.

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Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States. Most of these artifacts were cataloged as ornamental art objects, which erased their intended functions, and the removal of these objects often had catastrophic consequences for the original structures. Africa's Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage (Princeton UP, 2025) traces the history of the collection and distribution of African architectural fragments, documenting the brutality of the colonial regimes that looted Africa’s buildings and addressing the ethical questions surrounding the display of these objects.
Dr. Itohan Osayimwese ranges across the whole of Africa, from Egypt in the north to Zimbabwe in the south, and spanning the western, central, and eastern regions of the continent. She describes how collectors employed violent means to remove elements such as columns and door panels from buildings, and how these methods differentiated architectural collecting from conventional collecting. She shows how Western collectors mischaracterized building components as ornament, erasing their architectural character and concealing the evidence of their theft. Dr. Osayimwese discusses how the very act of displacing building parts like floor tiles and woven screen walls has resulted in a loss of knowledge about their original function and argues that because of these removals, scholars have yet to fully grasp the variety and character of African architecture.
Richly illustrated, Africa’s Buildings uncovers the vast scale of cultural displacement perpetrated by the West and proposes a new role for museums in this history, one in which they champion the repatriation of Africa’s architectural heritage and restitution for African communities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company (Bloomsbury, 2025) pieces together a new architectural history of West Africa from the high colonial period through to independence. From the imperial Royal Niger Company’s charter in the 1890s through to commercial developments in the 1960s, the United Africa Company – a British company firmly embedded in the economies of colonialism, extraction, and exploitation – became the largest firm in West Africa, involved in almost every commercial enterprise and sector, and responsible for procuring architecture, infrastructure, and urban real-estate across a vast region.

Drawing on the UAC’s archive, the book reproduces an array of visual material – from photographs of streetscapes and everyday life to civic reports and city plans – and presents these alongside critical discussions to reveal an alternative account of the architecture of the region in contrast to more state-focused histories.

This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on artistic techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023).

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Embassy buildings are the most tangible evidence of a state’s diplomatic presence abroad. State authorities have invested in the architectural conception of purpose-built embassies to flex their diplomatic muscle and project nationhood on foreign soil. While scholars have primarily focused on purpose-built embassies of (former) world powers, Building for Belgium: Belgian Embassies in a Globalising World (1945-2020) (Leuven UP, 2025) by Dr. Bram de Maeyer shifts the perspective by scrutinising the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ embassy-building programme from 1945 to 2020.

Rather than a conventional political assessment of diplomatic relations, the book foregrounds the often-overlooked architectural lives of embassies and their social, economic, and political entanglements. By examining Belgian embassy projects across all continents, it reveals how the Belgian diplomatic corps has navigated diverse political regimes, geopolitical contexts, cultures, and building codes. More than the outcome of a deliberate policy, the embassy-building programme has been shaped by incidental decisions, private ambitions and personal tastes of Belgian diplomats, ministry officials and politicians.

Building for Belgium not only sheds light on diplomatic architecture but also connects domestic conversations about architecture in Belgium with global state-building projects. Offering fresh insights into the politics of space, it will be of value to scholars and practitioners in architecture, urban studies, international relations, cultural heritage, and Belgian and European studies.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Richard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Health House, 1925–35 (Getty Research Institute, 2025) tells the story of the Lovell Health House, designed and built by Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra (1892–1970). Perched on a steep hillside with panoramic views of Los Angeles, the home pioneered the use of concrete and steel; radically advanced the ideals of hygienic, carefree, and open-air living; and explored new relationships between space, structure, the natural world, and physical and psychological well-being. It was widely documented and written about in leading architectural journals when it was erected, and these publications elevated the house to the status of an icon in the history of modernism and an essential work of the international modern movement. It also helped to launch the global career of one of the central figures of twentieth-century architecture.
The book includes new texts by Edward Dimendberg, Crosby Doe, and Nicholas Olsberg, a chronology by Thomas Hines, and historic texts by Willard D. Morgan and Richard Neutra. At the heart of the book are six narrated portfolios of visual and textual documentation on the background, design, making, circulation, reception and resonance of this seminal house. Featuring historical photography by Morgan and contemporary photography by Grant Mudford, this volume will help bring Neutra’s masterpiece to an entirely new audience.

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To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent.
With Spatial Theories for the Americas: Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024), Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space—drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and mostly architecture—and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of architecture, problematizing its theoretical foundation in relation to the inseparability of modernization and colonization. The second part makes explicit the insufficiencies of a hegemonic Western tradition at the core of spatial theories by discussing a long list of authors who have thought about the Americas.
To overcome centuries of Eurocentrism, Lara concludes, will require a tremendous effort, but, nonetheless, we have the responsibility of looking at the built environment of the Americas through our own lenses. Spatial Theories for the Americas proposes a fundamental step in that direction.

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From traditional nomadic dwellings to state-of-the-art airports, through monumental temples and Baroque palaces to high-rise apartments and high-fashion boutiques, The Story of the Interior: How We Have Shaped Rooms and How They Shape Us (Thames & Hudson, 2025) by Professor Graeme Brooker explores an exciting array of inside spaces from around the world to reveal how the fundamental elements of a room have evolved and endured.

Organized in three parts – The Room, The Private Interior and The Public Interior – the book presents a fascinating account of how the interior has been conceived and thought of from antiquity to the present day. By calling attention to the most basic elements of inside space – walls, doors, windows, furniture, ambience to name a few – this engaging exploration delves into how private and public interiors actively shape the way we live, work, learn and play.

The book spans a wide range of iconic and offbeat examples drawn from the world of architecture, urbanism and furniture design, as well as art installations and imagined spaces. Brooker deftly guides us through interiors as diverse as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, the Prada store in Marfa, Texas, and Sou Fujimoto’s NA House, as well as the rock-cut Buddhist temples of India, medieval European castles and ancient Egyptian tombs, to unveil the drastically different and surprisingly similar spaces that surround us.

The result is a fascinating tour of global interiors, tracing the genesis and evolution of these places and how they help us understand human presence and behaviour.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Reconstruction explores the impact of the First World War on the built environment - examining the immediate effects and aftermath of the Great War on the architecture of Britain and the British empire during the interwar years. While much attention has been paid by historians to post-war architectural reconstruction after 1945, the earlier developments of the interwar period (1919-1939) have been comparatively overlooked.

Sixteen essays written by leading and emerging scholars bring together new and diverse approaches to the period - a period of reconstruction, fraught with the challenges of modernity and democratisation. The collection considers the complex effects of reconstruction on design, discourse, practice, and professionalism, and deals with the full spectrum of architectural styles and approaches, privileging neither Modernism nor traditional styles. It brings to the fore social and political histories of the built environment, and makes important postcolonial interventions into the architectural history of British Imperialism at home and in its far reaches; in Egypt, South Africa, Australia, and India

This interview was conducted by Matthew Wells, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester. His research explores nineteenth-century European architecture, focusing on cultural techniques, technology, and political economy. Wells is the author of Modelling the Metropolis: The Architectural Model in Victorian London (2023).

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How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Stephanie Barczewski is an exploration of the evolution of the quintessentially English country house.

Country houses have come to be regarded as quintessentially English, not only in terms of their architectural style but because they appear to embody national values of continuity and insularity. The histories of country houses and England, however, have featured episodes of violence and disruption, so how did country houses come to represent one version of English history, when in reality they reflect its full range of contradictions and complexities? This book explores the evolution of the country house, beginning with the violent impact of the Reformation and Civil War and showing how the political events of the eighteenth century, which culminated in the reaction against the French Revolution, led to country houses being recast as symbols of England’s political stability.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal humanity's fundamental unity and common fate.

Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (U Texas Press, 2025) by Dr. Shiben Banerji recounts a continuous, if also contentious, transnational exchange among modernists and occultists across the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949. At stake were the feelings and affect of a new global subject who would perceive themselves as belonging to humanity as a unified whole, and the urban environment that would foster their subjectivity. The interventions in this debate, which drew in the period's most renowned modernists, took the form of a succession of plans for cities, suburbs, and communes, as well as experiments in building, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking, and writing. Weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist insight on subject formation, Dr. Banerji advances a new way of understanding modernist urban space as the design of subjective effects.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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