Alan Powers

Who is Alan Powers?

Alan Powers is a British teacher, researcher and writer specialising in architecture and design.

Powers trained as an art historian at University of Cambridge, gaining an undergraduate degree and a PhD.

As a writer Powers has been prolific, writing reviews, magazine articles, obituaries of artists and architects as well as books. He has concentrated on 20th century British architecture and architectural conservation. He has also written books on the design of book jackets, shopfronts, book collectors, and the artist Eric Ravilious as well as monographs on Serge Chermayeff, and the British firms of Tayler and Green and of Aldington, Graig and Collinge. He is joint editor of the journal Twentieth Century Architecture published by the Twentieth Century Society, and joint editor of the series of monographs, Twentieth Century Architects, published by RIBA and English Heritage with the Twentieth Century Society. In 2011-12, Powers was awarded a Mid Career Fellowship from the British Academy to study 'Figurative Architecture in the Time of Modernism', a study of non-modernist architecture in Britain.

He has curated several popular exhibitions, including Modern Britain 1929-39 Design Museum, 1999, Serge Chermayeff, 2001, Eric Ravilious, 2003 and Mind into Matter, 2009. His exhibition 'Eros to the Ritz: 100 years of street architecture' is at the Royal Academy, London, from late September 2012 to January 2013.