In the changing world of interwar Europe a longing for stability rose to the surface of social life. Newly developed neighbourhoods and buildings were designed to create the healing community that many people were dreaming of. Various social groups with nationalist, ideological, or religious agendas made this concept of community a cornerstone in their framework and appropriated it to prescribe the relations between architecture and modernity. Making a New World analyses the various ways in which these relations were determined.

Most reformers encountered the potentialities...

In the decades following World War Two, and in part in response to the Cold War, governments across Western Europe set out ambitious programmes for social welfare and the redistribution of wealth that aimed to improve the everyday lives of their citizens. Many of these welfare state programmes - housing, schools, new towns, cultural and leisure centres involved not just construction but a new approach to architectural design, in which the welfare objectives of these state-funded programmes were delineated and debated. The impact on architects and architectural design was profound and...