Critical text on leaders in architecture since the Victorian era by Nikolaus Pevsner. "To understand today's architecture and design one must know something of their background and development. The history of the modern movement in architecture and design was almost an unknown field until Nikolaus Pevsner first published his Pioneers which has since been universally recognized as the standard work on the subject. Mr. Pevsner tells the exciting story of the efforts of a relatively small group of men of genius which lifted our visual concepts out of the quagmire of late Victorian historicism, and led them afresh onto the path of honesty, fitness of purpose and contemporary expression. He shows how the foundation of the best that surrounds us today was laid then by men who thought and taught as well as designed. Mr. Pevsner has re-evaluated certain phases, such as Art Nouveau, and given a new emphasis to some of the English architects of the 1880s and '90s and to such men as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright. " -- from interior flap. Includes notes, table of names and dates, sources of illustrations, and an index. Printed in black-and-white.