History used to be about wars and dates, but to the architecture writer and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank, it's more about floors and grates. In his new book, he takes a keen-eyed tour of eight English houses, from Northumberland to Sussex, dating from the early 1700s to exactly 100 years ago, and ranging from an outlandish gothic pile to one of the first council flats.
For centuries, architecture has been shaped by the aspiration to create a smooth transition between the indoors and the outdoors. Today, technologically sophisticated window and facade systems allow architects to design open, light-flooded room concepts without losing heat. The Solarlux cero maximum sliding window can eliminate the boundaries between spaces, demonstrated most impressively when large-format elements replace building corners. This is a technical achievement accomplished entirely without supports that disrupt the view.
What is architecture? For some, its traditional role is to bring together imagination, technical knowledge, and problem-solving, allowing architects to design and construct while balancing ideas with the means to realize them. From the stone and wood of early buildings to the steel and concrete of the 20th century, each era demanded not only an understanding of form but also of the properties and potential of the materials in use.