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9781789144529

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A truly fascinating and consistently unexpected account of a forgotten landscape of lost futures. This richly original work chronicles the designed world of the undead and, at the same time, challenges today's easy consensus of progress and modernization. Entertaining, jolting, and scholarly, it is a superb counterblast to our own age of relentless upgrades and product improvements. --Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London This is a wonderfully curious book about how the ghosts of extinct inventions live on, not just in our minds but in the world around us. It is strangely addictive to discover how the epitaphs of these technologies form the blueprints of our future. --Mark Miodownik, author of Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World Extinct is an intoxicating exploration of a host of objects, systems, and protocols that are no longer in use or never made it. They are design ghosts, actively haunting the present and conjuring up alternative nested futures. Each short story becomes epic. This brilliant book is a survey of the future rather than of the past. --Beatriz Colomina, Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture, Princeton University, and author of Are We Human?: Notes on an Archaeology of Design Objects have come and gone from our lives throughout history, mostly because something new has been designed to fulfill their functions more efficiently, appealingly, economically, or sustainably. Never before has this happened with such speed or on the same scale as in the digital age. Extinct is 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, author of Design as an Attitude

A truly fascinating and consistently unexpected account of a forgotten landscape of lost futures. This richly original work chronicles the designed world of the undead and, at the same time, challenges today's easy consensus of progress and modernization. Entertaining, jolting, and scholarly, it is a superb counterblast to our own age of relentless upgrades and product improvements. --Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London This is a wonderfully curious book about how the ghosts of extinct inventions live on, not just in our minds but in the world around us. It is strangely addictive to discover how the epitaphs of these technologies form the blueprints of our future. --Mark Miodownik, author of Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World Objects have come and gone from our lives throughout history, mostly because something new has been designed to fulfill their functions more efficiently, appealingly, economically, or sustainably. Never before has this happened with such speed or on the same scale as in the digital age. Extinct is 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, author of Design as an Attitude

Author Information

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.

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