A History of Western Architecture

Laurence King, 2023

I was commissioned to revise and update David Watkin’s classic survey A History of Western Architecture, which was first published in 1985. For the new seventh edition I have written a new introduction contextualizing Watkin's approach to charting the history of western architecture from the earliest times in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the late twentieth century. A new final chapter largely picks up from where Watkin originally left the story in the mid-1980s to explore a variety of trends in contemporary architecture and considers, more broadly, what meaning the very notion of western architecture has in the twenty-first century.