Hal Foster’s Design and Crime is a compact collection of essays on architecture, design, art and the aesthetics of city life.

Taking its title from Adolf Loos’s famous attack on ornament, Foster asks what happens when design becomes the condition of almost everything: buildings, brands, museums, identities, commodities, even political culture.

Moving through figures including Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and the legacy of modernism, Foster is especially sharp on the merger of culture and commerce, the rise of the designer as a dominant cultural figure. The essays are polemical without being throwaway: brief, argumentative pieces about what gets lost when every object and experience is expected to announce itself aesthetically. A useful bridge between art criticism, architecture and cultural theory.

Verso, London/New York. This edition first published 2002; paperback edition first published 2003. Radical Thinkers series. Paperback. Light shelf wear and faint handling marks to covers, minor corner wear; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Very good condition.