Extinct. This item is unavailable.Extinct

'A book so far up our street it may as well move in ... Buy this brilliant book now.' Electric Sound Magazine

'Entertaining, jolting, and scholarly Extinct is a superb counter-blast to our own age of relentless upgrades and product improvements.' Tristram Hunt, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

'both a thoughtful and incisive analysis of the phenomenon and an engaging tribute to some of the intriguing or eccentric objects we have lost in design’s equivalent of natural selection.' Alice Rawsthorn

'This brilliant book is a survey of the future rather than of the past.' Beatriz Colomina

'A wonderfully curious book about how the ghosts of extinct inventions live on, not just in our minds but in the world around us.'Mark Miodownik, author of Stuff Matters

Extinct gathers together the work of an exceptional range of artists, curators, architects, critics and academics, including Barry Bergdoll, Gillian Darley, Tacita Dean, David Edgerton, Hal Foster, Catherine Slessor, Deyan Sudjic and Richard Wentworth. In 85 illustrated essays, contributors nominate ‘extinct’ objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal essays, speaking of not only obsolete technologies, but other ways of thinking, making and interacting with the world. Extinct is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future that never came to pass.

Barbara Penner is professor of architectural humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. Her books include Bathroom, also published by Reaktion Books, and she is a contributing editor of Places Journal. Adrian Forty is professor emeritus of architectural history at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He is the author of many books, including Concrete and Culture: A Material History, also published by Reaktion Books. Olivia Horsfall Turner is a historian of architecture and design and senior curator of designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Miranda Critchley is completing her PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, on railways and colonial narratives of progress.