Bleak Houses is a unique guide through architecture's own disconsolate circles of hell, from the hopelessness of revivalism to the curse of the mutilating extension. At once comic and bitter, wry and lachrymose, Brittain-Catlin's Virgil inducts the reader in architecture's vast lacunae of the mediocre, the disappointed and the sad. In speaking to and for the many buildings for which there is no discourse because they merit none, he skillfully reveals how failure can be a whole lot more illuminating than success. This book will make a lot of architects, myself included, feel very uncomfortable indeed.
Francesca Hughes
At least half the architects mentioned in this catalog of failure are names you've never heard of. Remarkably, Timothy Brittain-Catlin turns the story of these people he calls losers into one of the most compelling books about architecture I've read in a long time.
Robert Harbison, author of Eccentric Spaces
Timothy Brittain-Catlin's Bleak Houses is unique for being the first history of architects who, by conventional standards, have been considered losers or failures. By telling the story of those who just fell outside the canon, or outside the circle of fame traced by a triumphalist history, Brittain-Catlin maps out an alternative architectural history without teleological narratives about style, change, and influence and thus offers a quieter and more modest way of looking at buildings that can relate much more closely to our own experiences. Witty and captivating, with an interesting touch of melancholy, it makes you think and see the world differently.
Martin Bressani, McGill University
...there are few books I can think of that describe the emotional engagement with architecture with such acuity. And despite the subject, Bleak Houses is anything but a bleak read.
Richard Williams
The Times Higher Education
...this is one of the most intriguing, original and gently provocative books on the meaning of architecture for some while.
Architecture Review
...It's a book that all who not only write on architecture but who also have a genuine interest in the welfare of the historic built environment ought to read.
Alex Bremner
The Victorian
