Dr Barnabas Calder

Personal Statement

Barnabas Calder is a historian of architecture specialising in the relationship between architecture and energy throughout human history. He also works on British architecture since 1945. His book Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency (Pelican, 2021) has been hailed as 'one of the most significant architectural publications of recent years' (Professor Florian Urban, in The Drouth). It is currently being translated into Italian, Turkish and Japanese.

Professor Adrian Forty wrote of Calder's book Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism (William Heinemann, 2016), 'like Ruskin, the intensity of his observation can be startling. Calder has looked longer and harder at the buildings he writes about than most other people, and this makes for compelling reading.'

Barnabas is working on a history of the relationship between energy and human culture, and a complete works of Denys Lasdun, funded by the Graham Foundation and in collaboration with the RIBA British Architectural Library Special Collections.