A Financial Times Best Book of the YearA Guardian Best Architecture Book of the Year ¿Sharp
revealing funny.¿ ¿The Guardian ¿An original and even occasionally hilarious book about losing
ideals and finding them again¿ [De Graaf] deftly shows that architecture cannot be better or
more pure than the flawed humans who make it.¿ ¿The Economist Architecture we like to believe
is an elevated art form that shapes the world as it pleases. Four Walls and a Roof turns this
fiction on its head offering a candid account of what it¿s really like to work as an
architect. Drawing on his own tragicomic experiences in the field Reinier de Graaf reveals the
world of contemporary architecture in vivid snapshots: from the corridors of wealth in London
Moscow and Dubai to the demolished hopes of postwar social housing in New York and St. Louis.
We meet ambitious oligarchs developers for whom architecture is nothing more than an
investment and layers of bureaucrats consultants and mysterious hangers-on who lie between
any architect¿s idea and the chance of its execution. ¿This is a book about power money and
influence and architecture¿s complete lack of any of them¿ Witty insightful and funny it is
a (sometimes painful) dissection of a profession that thinks it is still in control.¿
¿Financial Times ¿This is the most stimulating book on architecture and its practice that I
have read for years.¿ ¿Architects¿ Journal
