A vivid retelling of the biblical story of Babel leads from the contested site of Babylon to the soaring towers of the modern metropolis, and sets the bright hopes of early modernism against the shadows of gathering war. Dealing in structural metaphor, utopian aspiration, and geopolitical ambition, Dugdale exposes the inexorable architectural implications of the event described by Nietzsche as the death of God.
Kyle Dugdale teaches history, theory, and design at Yale School of Architecture. He holds an undergraduate degree from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a professional degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and a doctoral degree from Yale. A resident of New York City and a licensed architect, he has also taught at Columbia and at the City College of New York. He is a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. His research has been supported by the Society of Architectural Historians, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and his work has been published in journals including Perspecta, Thresholds, Utopian Studies, and Wolkenkuckucksheim.