In 1944, the publisher Paul Elek approached the well-known architect Jane Drew to edit an Architects' Year Book. Given free rein during the period 1945 to the 1960s, ten volumes appeared with generously illustrated articles by leading thinkers, critics and practitioners in the fields of architecture, art and design. Trevor Dannatt, then working for Drew, was involved from the start and became joint editor, and then sole editor with an editorial board consisting of Ove Arup, Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry and Herbert Read. The wide range of authors and work published in the AYB included that by or on Peter and Alison Smithson, Le Corbusier, Erno Goldfinger, James Stirling, Naum Gabo and Aldo Van Eyck.The Architects' Year Book Symposium is a revised and re-edited selection of the most relevant and engaging material featured in the first ten volumes of the AYB . Compiled by Trevor Dannatt, Duncan McCorquodale and Eric Parry, the Architects' Year Book Symposium is an essential contribution to the historiography of twentieth century architecture, and will be of interest to architects, historians, students and anyone with an interest in the impact and legacy of Modernism across the fields of architecture, art and design.
