Post-War Optimism: An Autopsy

The thesis of this book is stated plainly on page one: post-war architecture was the product of a genuine belief that the built environment could produce better human beings, and this belief was wrong, and the wrongness was not accidental but structural, and understanding the structure of the wrongness is necessary if we want to do better.

Lintel handles the history. Staircase handles the buildings. They disagree, at several points in the text, about whose section is more important, and these disagreements are visible in the footnotes if you are reading carefully.

The final chapter, written jointly, is titled 'What We Owe.' It is six pages long. Harold considers it the most important six pages in any book published in the last decade. He has recommended it to several people without recommending the rest of the book, which he considers separately excellent.

The autopsy metaphor is not a metaphor, Lintel clarifies in the preface. It is a method. An autopsy does not wish the subject had not died. It simply determines what happened.