Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic
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In Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic (MIT Press), architectural historian Gabriele Neri retraces Alan Dunn’s path from painter to renowned cartoonist, offering an unconventional perspective on architectural and urban transformations—and on their perception within society.
Featuring 200 carefully selected images, including Dunn’s correspondence, unpublished cartoons, preliminary sketches, watercolors, and rare photographs, Alan Dunn demonstrates the critical potential of caricature and cartoons for architectural history. Through Neri’s deft analysis, the book also reveals the complex intersections of architecture with media, publishing, commerce, society, art, and politics.
As Lewis Mumford once wrote of Dunn: “Shall I say that he is obviously a better architect than the architects whose fashionable clichés and grim follies he exposes? Or shall I say that his urbane satiric style, deft but merciless, puts him in a class by himself; for this is what has been missing from contemporary criticism in all the arts. All this is true; but it is not enough.”
Read an excerpt from the book: The Cartoonist Who Mocked the Madness of Modernism. Order the book here.
