Jules Lubbock is an art historian at the University of Essex with an interest both in the history of architecture and urbanism and the art of the Italian Renaissance. He was architecture and design critic of the New Statesman in the 1980s where he championed the cause of Community Architecture and what has come to be known as New Urbanism. This led him, somewhat improbably perhaps, to work with the Prince of Wales on both the 1984 Carbuncle Speech (though he did not coin the phrase) and the later speech at the Mansion House of 1987 on planning policy. While broadly supporting New Urbanism, Paternoster Square and indeed Poundbury he also greatly admires the commercial suburbs of the interwar years and is highly sceptical of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act which established Britain’s policy of urban containment and green belts. He also admires such masterpieces of post-war architecture like the Hayward Gallery and the so-called Brutalist architecture of his own campus at the University of Essex.

His Tyranny of Taste: the Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550-1960 (Yale 1995) explains how British architecture and design has been shaped by economic and moral concerns. Between 2002-2005 he directed a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council on Concepts of Self in the Theory and Practice of Architecture and Town Planning since 1945.  His most recent book, Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello (Yale 2006), explains how artists solved difficult problems in representing biblical stories; it was awarded the Art and Christian Enquiry Book Award for 2008.

He is currently writing a book on Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s famous 1339 frescoes of war, peace and good government in the Sala della Pace in the Palazzo Communale of Siena. After this he intends returning to architecture. He has written for the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Building Design, Architects’ Journal, RIBA Journal  and Art and Christianity.