visual signs of the civic, but as technological actors. Through their physical construction, they promote or prohibit certain behaviours, social interactions or modes of habitation. As Herring notes, in the post-war decades, these concerns were only prioritised by muni- cipal engineers, who were more interested in what street furniture did than in how well it sat within the landscape. My favourite anecdote in the whole book (and there are a great many to choose from) concerns Norwich City Council, which tested the effects of pro- spective street lights on the colour of women’s make-up before making its decision in . Sadly, as Herring notes, local authorities have not retained the records of these historic discussions, so we can never recover their forgotten conversations about the social impact of particular amenities. Thankfully, however, the interventionist agendas of post-war design organisations produced more extensive archives and lists of publica- tions. As a detailed exploration of the work of these bodies, their competing ideologies and the fallout of their oft-locked horns, Herring’s Street Furniture Design is an enlighten- ing book which has much to tell us about the contested visual meanings of everyday urban objects. Adam Sharr and Stephen Thornton, Demolishing Whitehall: Leslie Martin, Harold Wilson and the Architecture of White Heat; Routledge (London, ),  pp. incl.  ills; ISBN: ;£. doi:./arh.. Reviewed by TIJANA VUJOSEVIC In a recent article (Grey Room, Summer ), Antoine Picon addresses a key issue in recent architectural history — the relationship between architecture and utopia. This theme is essential to re-evaluating the political role of the discipline, namely its capacity to articulate and implement radical ideas about the political future. According to Picon, the reason architecture cannot be utopian is that properly utopian environments, as championed in treatises about the ideal society at the end of history, such as Campanella’s City of Sun or Bacon’s New Atlantis, have to be ‘blurry’. That is, they have to be concrete enough to guarantee the feasibility of the project, but at the same time vague enough to signal the open possibilities of the future. Architectural transla- tions of utopia are not vague, ‘spectral’ enough; the architect’s concern for feasibility and detail means their work can never be utopian. It cannot be a conduit for aspiration and hope in the way of the literary utopian discourse. The s and s are arguably the last moment to date in which utopian politics played an important cultural role. Today, when the political role of architecture is again becoming the central concern in architectural theory, the history of the s has a special place in architectural discourse. Greg Castillo’s  exhibition at the Walker Art Centre and a series of books published in the last decade — specifically Felicity Scott’s Architecture or Techno-Utopia (Cambridge, MA, ) and Arindam Dutta’s edited volume A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ BOOK REVIEWS 