WSOA Faculty Member Anthony Fontenot’s Book Non-Design Receives Continued International Recognition and Acclaim
We are pleased to share that WSOA faculty member Anthony Fontenot’s groundbreaking book, Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and The Market (University of Chicago Press, 2021), a study of American and British postwar architecture and urban planning theory, continues to generate significant attention and international critical acclaim. Recently, the book was reviewed by Amy Thomas, Associate Professor of architectural and cultural history in the Department of Architecture at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) in 2023, as well as Michael Abrahamson, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Utah, an award-winning architectural historian and critic, in the New York Review of Architecture (2025).
Fontenot’s multidisciplinary work has been lauded internationally by architects, urban planners, landscape architects, economists, historians, and critics for its innovative perspective and its acute ability to establish critical connections between economic thinking, architecture, and urbanism. As Edward Dimendberg, Professor of Humanities and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, notes, Non-Design is “a landmark contribution to the study of the built environment” and a “provocative work of historical scholarship” that establishes Fontenot “as one of the field’s most perspicacious intellectual historians.”
Harry Francis Mallgrave, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Theory at the Illinois Institute of Technology, perhaps the preeminent architectural theorist in the United States, described the book as follows: “Rich in ideas, edifying in its connecting lines, Fontenot’s survey of mid-twentieth-century (non)planning theory is a masterful compendium of urban discussions holding significant relevance today.”
Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at New York University’s Institute for Fine Arts, one of the most distinguished European scholars, praised Non-Design as a “thoroughly researched tome” that shapes “an innovative vision of postwar architecture” while inventively exploring the critical discourse that challenged “central planning and functional design” in the second half of the twentieth century.
Alberto Mingardi, Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pavia, Director General of the Istituto Bruno Leoni (Milan) published a major review of the book in History of Economic Ideas (Pisa-Roma), an international journal of the history of political economy, in which he described Non-Design as a “fascinating book” and unmatched in its examination of the relationship between “design theory in the 20th century and the renaissance of classical liberalism (that sometimes goes under the name of “neoliberalism”) after WWII.”
The book’s impact continues to resonate within the architectural community and beyond, and we are excited to see its ongoing influence. For more on the recent reviews, you can read Michael Abrahamson’s review here.
Congratulations to Anthony Fontenot on this continued recognition!