A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A 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
