Architecture of Wales – serie

Cardiff’s civic centre in Cathays Park, described as the finest civic centre in the British Isles, is an impressive planned group of public buildings, begun largely with wealth created by the coal industry in the south Wales coalfield. This book covers the Cardiff site’s earlier evolution as a private park in the nineteenth century by the fabulously rich Bute family, and the borough’s battles to obtain land for public buildings and the park’s development in the twentieth century, to become Britain’s finest civic centre. All the buildings, memorials and statues in the park are fully described and illustrated in this book which includes maps, plans and photographs. The History and Architecture of Cardiff Civic Centre is the first in the series Architecture of Wales, published in partnership with the Royal Society of Architects in Wales.

The story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life is no less astounding than his greatest architectural works. He enmeshed himself eagerly in myth and hearsay, and revelled in the extravagance of his creative persona. Throughout his long career, Wright strongly resisted the suggestion that his accomplishments owed anything to earthly influences. As much as he wanted his achievements to be recognised, he wanted them to be unaccountable – but they are not. This book reveals for the first time how his unbreakable self-belief and startling creative defiance both originated in the liberal religious and philosophical attitudes woven into his personality during his childhood – deliberately so by his mother and by his many aunts and uncles, to honour the fierce Welsh radicalism of their ancestors.

Sir Percy Thomas was the most important twentieth-century architect in Wales, renowned for interwar civic buildings such as Swansea Guildhall and the Temple of Peace in Cardiff. His architectural practice, Sir Percy Thomas & Son, designed much of the post-1945 welfare state and industry in Wales and beyond. In the late twentieth century, the Percy Thomas Partnership specialised in complex healthcare, industrial and public buildings, becoming an international practice.This comprehensive, meticulously-researched history examines the architecture of Percy Thomas in depth for the first time, and explores its wider social and political significance. Arguing that the practice sustained an ethical approach to architecture as a ‘national service’ for the benefit of society, this book gives new insights into the role of the architect and the changing relationships between the built environment and the state throughout the century. Its unique perspective from Wales promises to reshape our understanding of modern architecture.