This major publication documents the life and work of professor Florian Beigel, an architect and educator whose influence on the development of British architecture over the past forty years was unparalleled. Beigel’s practice, the Architecture Research Unit, was based at London Metropolitan University for forty-six years, where its teaching and building activities were closely combined. Beigel was instrumental in setting the intellectual agenda of a school that grew to become the most progressive and influential in Britain. Providing the first comprehensive survey of Beigel’s internationally recognized architectural practice from the 1960s to his death in August 2018, the publication also includes interviews with many of his collaborators, colleagues and students including Adam Caruso and Peter St John, Patrick Keiller, Seung H-Sang, Tony Fretton, Jan de Vylder, Kim Jong-Kyu, Peter Märkli, and Iñaki Abalos.

Pamela Johnston is a freelance editor with three decades’ experience in architectural publishing. For more than twenty of those years she helped shape the reputation of AA Publications, the publishing arm of the Architectural Association in London. Independently, she has worked with Princeton University Press, the Architecture Foundation in London, Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Geneva, Strelka Press in Moscow, and the Milan-based San Rocco magazine. An important self-directed project—the fruit of a four-year collaboration—is Peter Märkli: Everything one invents is true (Quart Verlag, 2017). She studied the history of ideas at the University of London and interpreting and translation at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.