The Charged Void ─ Urbanism

British architects and urbanists Alison and Peter Smithson first rose to prominence in the 1950s. Many of their ideas, social, architectural, and urban, profoundly influenced generations of practitioners, students, and academics.
The Charged Void: Urbanism is the companion volume to The Charged Void: Architecture; the two comprise the complete works of Alison and Peter Smithson. The Charged Void: Urbanism collects the urban form projects from the Smithsons' extensive and prolific collaboration, as well as building projects with specific implications for urban form. The work is ordered thematically in fourteen chapters: cluster, cohesion, pavilion and route.
More than a collection of work, this book represents a record of a careful and highly focused thought process concerned with the qualities of urban life - a collection of observations, decipherings, commentaries, and recommendations for understanding and improving the complex nature of the city.

Alison and Peter Smithson produced one of the most significant and influential bodies of work of the second half of the twentieth century. Their books include Urban Structuring, Ordinariness and Light, Without Rhetoric, The Shift, and Team X Primer. Alison Smithson died in 1993, and Peter Smithson died in 2003, two years after the publication of The Charged Void: Architecture.