This is not an unfamiliar narrative. Plenty of historians have considered how colonialism and global war suited the aims of Modernism quite well. Dugdale takes a different route in that he seeks to find the literal roots of this misalignment at the very beginning, in the spiritual and sacred origins of architecture. In this sense, the book consists of two micronarratives, each entwined with the other like the strands of a double helix. The first is a theoretical and architectural account of the Tower of Babel. Dugdale’s rigor here is on display as he takes readers on a tour of the various stories of the Tower’s origins, from antiquity onward. Lavishly illustrated spreads also show how early modern architectural writers and chroniclers, from Athanasius Kircher to Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, imagined the building. The highlight here, however, is a stunning and engrossing architectural interpretation of the Book of Genesis. This is no mere equating of language and building but a tour-de-force argument that envisages the Old Testament as a kind of architectural manual. Through Dugdale’s exacting and careful exposition, the architectonic lessons to be gleaned from Genesis become clearer—at one point, even the importance of walls and partitions to the creation of Adam and Eve is demonstrated. This is all precursory, serving as a backdrop for the author’s excursions around the ways the Tower of Babel has persisted in the modern imagination.

Uriel Birnbaum's The City of Steps (Die Stufenstadt) from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924).

Why, then, does Dugdale insist that the Tower of Babel was not persistent but, rather (as the book’s subtitle tells us), resurgent? The answer lies somewhat in his second micronarrative—a close reading of an overlooked text, The Kaiser and the Architect (1924), by the Austrian painter Uriel Birnbaum—a figure largely absent from architectural history. Dugdale sees Birnbaum’s tale as a spirited response to the secularism and paganism he associated with German Expressionism. The son of Nathan Birnbaum, one of the founders of Zionism, Birnbaum’s own architectural travels read as a counterpoint to architect Erich Mendelsohn’s friendship with future Israeli president Chaim Weizmann and fascination with the writings of the philosopher Martin Buber. Much like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, The Kaiser and the Architect features a series of imaginary metropolises, all painted by Birnbaum in a way that mimics stained-glass windows in Gothic cathedrals. And, like the Tower of Babel, Birnbaum’s work was also subject to misinterpretation and disaffection. His books were mined (and misread) for ulterior purposes, resulting in the humanity-stripped devotion exhibited by crowds during Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light at the Zeppelin grounds in Nuremberg.

There are other ways to describe how Dugdale’s excellent Architecture After God identifies parallels between architecture and religion. The book begins with a vivid description of artifacts on display at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, one in which curatorial ambition and collection strategies transform a signature Modernist building into a reliquary. And then there’s Uriel Birnbaum’s own exclusion from the architectural canon. Readers already understand the ecclesiastical origins of “the canon” and “canonical,” words used to elevate extraordinary persons to immortality, now used to ensconce architects and thinkers in a mantle of professional adulation. This is a book for readers of all stripes, as Dugdale makes clear, but it is suffused with a kind of conviction rarely seen in architectural writing these days. It is also a deeply personal book; Dugdale is trying to understand his own journey in architecture and wants readers along for the ride.