Big House Little City

Combining architectural and urban thinking in an unusual and engaging way this book presents an integrated approach to architectural theory and design. Leon Battista Alberti¿s assertion in his famous Renaissance treatise that "the city is like a big house, and the house is in turn like a little city", forms the springboard for a series of reflections on architecture¿s relationship to urbanism and how their once intimate symbiosis, unravelled by International Style Modernism, can be recovered.

Explicit references to Alberti¿s house-city phrase have been made by figures as diverse as the architects Louis Kahn, Aldo Van Eyck, Denys Lasdun and Niels Torp, and novelist Italo Calvino. But, as the book shows, thinking of buildings as little cities provides a new lens through which to reappraise the contributions of many other architects, including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Eliel Saarinen, Bernard Rudofsky, Hans Scharoun, Leon Krier, Fumihiko Maki, Charles