Times of Creative Destruction - Shaping Buildings and Cities in the late C20th

Times of Creative Destruction is about the years that followed the end of WWII, one of the most seminal and dramatic epochs in human history, during which extraordinary star-buildings were born, cities exploded, and an unprecedented world of a -Third Ecology- emerged. Never before was there such a flurry of daring mega-constructions, such daring spatial acrobatics, -star- buildings by star architects attained by star developers, mega-constructions, technological feats, and flourishing spatial acrobatics. But, for all its exhilarating creativity, this was also an era of unanticipated, intractable, irreversible destruction reducing the uniqueness and diversity of cultural, social and ecological peaks and valleys of our world, to a -desert flatland-, environmental inequality and unhappiness.

This book critically discusses and revaluates these contradictory events, bringing together and commenting on a selection of shorter key texts by Tzonis and Lefaivre, the product of