Architect and historian, England Determined to sustain the humane possibilities of architecture in a world without the master narratives of cultural authority and universal history, Alan Colquhoun has made rigorous contributions to the discipline as a theorist, writer, critic, and architect. Throughout the 1950s he was, according to Reyner Banham in The New Brutalism, “one of the guardians of the intellectual conscience of his generation of London architects” (1966). As an architect working in London, he was one of the earliest modernists to submit the clichés of modernism to functional and contextual critique in the hope of redefining architecture after the death of neoclassical repetition and the birth of ahistorical relativism. Colquhoun’s earliest connection was to the architects of a nascent movement called Brutalism (sometimes referred to as the New Brutalists) that was pioneered in England by Peter and Allison Smithson as an aesthetic response to the country’s desire...