Bleak houses: disappointment and failure in architecture

The usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic makers.

But it is also a false narrative in many ways, rarely acknowledging the personal failures and disappointments of architects.

In 'Bleak Houses', Timothy Brittain-Catlin investigates the underside of architecture, the stories of losers and unfulfillment often ignored by an architectural criticism that values novelty, fame, and virility over fallibility and rejection.