My book traces the career of Alan Dunn, one of the most brilliant American cartoonists of the twentieth century and a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, as well as to many other major newspapers and magazines. In particular, it explores how Dunn commented on — and, above all, mocked — the extraordinary transformation of modern architecture and the modern city from the 1920s through the 1970s, subjects to which he devoted much of his work.

At the heart of the book is a simple idea: humor and satire can serve as remarkably powerful lenses through which to understand something as serious as architecture. In this sense, the cartoon can be considered a distinctive form of public architectural criticism alongside more conventional and traditional genres. Indeed, cartoons are often even more effective than those forms: thanks to their extraordinary graphic and verbal synthesis, they can reach far beyond specialists and engage a much broader public in debates about the built environment.

Alan Dunn is an emblematic case. Astonishingly, he has been almost forgotten, despite publishing roughly 2,000 cartoons for The New Yorker and thousands more for other major periodicals. This is the first book dedicated to him since his death in 1974.

Dunn originally trained as a painter in the 1920s, studying at prestigious schools in the United States, Italy, and France. Yet when he returned home, he could barely sell a painting. He therefore turned to cartoons — a passion since his youth — and quickly became one of the leading figures in the field, soon recruited by the newly founded New Yorker. Although he drew every imaginable subject, architecture and the city fascinated him above all. At a time when New York's skyline was rising at a dizzying pace and new technologies and aesthetics were reshaping everyday life, Dunn used cartoons to chronicle, week after week, this epochal transformation in which architecture intersected with society, economics, technology, and culture.

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For this reason, in 1937 he was also hired by the highly respected magazine Architectural Record, for which he produced around 450 cartoons — one a month.

Taken together, Dunn's drawings — from the Chrysler Building to the Twin Towers, from Bauhaus-style houses to the Guggenheim Museum — offer an unconventional chronicle of twentieth-century architecture, not only in America but beyond. His perspective also restores something often missing from architectural histories and specialist journals: the viewpoint of the inhabitant, the citizen, the client, the construction worker, and other figures so frequently overlooked. What did ordinary people think when confronted with a house shaped like a cube? How did city dwellers feel, a century ago, surrounded by forests of skyscrapers? What relationship existed between the human body — especially the female body, so often confined to domestic space during the twentieth century — and architecture itself?

Moving fluidly between humor and satire, Dunn exposed the contradictions, ambiguities, excesses, and failures of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism. There is the prefabricated house blown away in a storm because it is built with innovative yet fragile materials; the architect who treats his client like a laboratory guinea pig; the all-glass house impossible to clean; suburbs filled with identical houses inhabited by identical people with identical dogs; traffic-choked cities; and historic buildings threatened by real-estate speculation. In Dunn's work, reality and parody constantly merge, making us laugh, certainly, but also compelling us to reflect deeply on how we live — and, if we are architects, on how we design the world around us.

Ongoing thread. More from Gabriele Neri to follow.