The Pyramids and the Taj Mahal are witness to the extravagant architectural tributes that, throughout human history, the great and the wealthy have paid to their dead. In this book, a well-known architectural historian provides a history of funerary architecture in western Europe from the earliest megalithic tombs of prehistory to the establishment of public cemeteries in the nineteenth century. With sensitivity and wit, Howard Colvin traces the ways in which these structures represent changing ideas about the after-life as well as changes in architectural style.

Almost 40% of architecture graduates choose not to practise as architects. Instead, by ‘leaving’ their chosen profession, this surprisingly large but vastly overlooked cohort are making significant contributions to a wide range of other sectors, from politics to videogame design, demonstrating that architectural training can be a pathway to roles, and even leadership opportunities, across a variety of other professions. Architecture’s Afterlife is the first book to examine the sectors into which these graduates migrate, and to identify the transferable skills that are learned, but not always taught, in their degree programmes, and that prove most useful in their new careers. The book – a result of a three-year pan-European study funded by Erasmus+ – provides a roadmap for increasing graduate employment, addressing skills shortages across all sectors and adapting curricula to changing professional landscapes. It is therefore essential reading for all those responsible for curriculum design and delivery in architecture and other disciplines, including deans, professors, postgraduate researchers and policy makers, as well as students and professionals seeking to expand their career prospects.

What can you do with a degree in architecture? Where might it take you? What kind of challenges could you address? Architects After Architecture reframes architecture as a uniquely versatile way of acting on the world, far beyond that of designing buildings. In this volume, we meet forty practitioners through profiles, case studies, and interviews, who have used their architectural training in new and resourceful ways to tackle the climate crisis, work with refugees, advocate for diversity, start tech companies, become leading museum curators, tackle homelessness, draft public policy, become developers, design videogames, shape public discourse, and much more. Together, they describe a future of architecture that is diverse and engaged, expanding the limits of the discipline, and offering new paths forward in times of crisis. Whether you are an architecture student or a practicing architect considering a change, you’ll find this an encouraging and inspiring read. Please visit the Architects After Architecture website for more information, including future book launches and events: architectsafterarchitecture.com

Nicholas Hawksmoor (1662–1736) is one of English history’s greatest architects, outshone only by Christopher Wren, under whom he served as an apprentice. A major figure in his own time, he was involved in nearly all the grandest architectural projects of his age, and he is best known for his London churches, six of which still stand today. Hawksmoor wasn’t always appreciated, however: for decades after his death, he was seen as at best a second-rate talent. From the Shadows tells the story of the resurrection of his reputation, showing how over the years his work was ignored, abused, and altered—and, finally, recovered and celebrated. It is a story of the triumph of talent and of the power of appreciative admirers like T. S. Eliot, James Stirling, Robert Venturi, and Peter Ackroyd, all of whom played a role in the twentieth-century recovery of Hawksmoor’s reputation.

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.

This book offers a new perspective on the evolution of cities across the Roman Empire in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

After filming over 50 people under deep hypnosis saying the same things about the afterlife ("Flipside" "It's a Wonderful Afterlife" "Hacking the Afterlife") the author began recording interviews with people without hypnosis - live on the radio, in person, via skype, asking the same simple questions and found everyone describes the same journey.