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years ago, so civic pride never took over to build a more magnificent Gothic church. In recent decades the knowledge of buildings has been supplemented by information inferred from the remains of timbers that have rotted in the ground. Rotted timbers change the colour and consistency of the earth that has claimed them, and if the site has not been built over in the mean time, or ploughed with a deep modern blade, then it is possible to guess what the buildings might have been like. So, if we are trying to put together a picture of Anglo-Saxon architecture, we find that the positions of discoloured samples of earth are important evidence for us, and we would not dream of ignoring a surviving house, if one were ever to be authenticated. Historically it would be sensationally important, even if it were an unprepossessing little building.

If we are trying to write a history of modern architecture then we have exactly the opposite problem. There is too much of it to be able to mention everything, and almost everything in fact has to be left out. In a large modern city the largest modern buildings are likely to be commercial – office blocks, shopping malls, multi-storey car parks, and so on. These buildings tend to be edited out of the picture presented in an architectural history, because the buildings do not seem to be culturally significant. There are rare exceptions, like the Seagram Building in New York (Figure 18) which has an unusual status, for reasons that will be explained. Even buildings of great prominence and visual interest (like the Philadelphia City Hall) do not have a wide enough cultural significance to justify their inclusion in a traditional overview, whereas a small house like the Schröder House (Figure 9), tucked away inconspicuously out of the centre of Utrecht – itself a much smaller city than Philadephia – is one of the best known buildings of the 20th century. Among architects it is without question the best known 20th-century building in the Netherlands. In fact among architects outside the Netherlands it is probably the best known building of any age in that country. And this is despite the fact that in central Utrecht, in a prominent position, there is a spectacular post office, dating from about the same time. It is adventurous in its use of materials, making the traditional Netherlands bricks into a series of parabolic arches with glazing between them, so the post office’s central hall is flooded with light in a spectacular way. It is a more prominent building, more technically accomplished, and its interior is just as striking, and yet only a specialist would know who designed it, and it is seen to be of only local interest.

18. Seagram Building, Manhattan, New York City (1954–8); architects: Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) and Philip Johnson (born 1906). Mies van der Rohe was an architect of great seriousness, who was head of the experimental design school, the Bauhaus, in Berlin. He left Germany during the 1930s and moved to Chicago, where he developed his concern for carefully considered steel-frame buildings. His earlier American commissions were in and near Chicago, and included a startlingly transparent steel-frame house for Edith Farnsworth (1945–51) and a pair of apartment buildings overlooking Lake Michigan, 845–60 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago (1948–51). Here too the outer skin of the building is all glass, subdivided by an absolutely regular steel grid. The Seagram Building was a far more prestigious project, both because of its prominent site and its lavish budget. The glass here is bronze-tinted, and the vertical mullions between the windows are dark bronze. Instead of making the building step back from the pavement line on its upper storeys in order to conform with the building codes, the building makes the extravagant gesture of devoting a good deal of the site to a public open space, and then the building is taken up vertically from the edge of the plaza to the top, without breaking the lines of the mullions. In a city where the price of land was lower, the gesture would have