A striking aspect of Elain Harwood’s Space, Hope and Brutalism (Yale University Press), a hefty survey of postwar British architecture, is that it isn’t about brutalism precisely, but about this and many other styles of architecture. So it seems that someone, her publishers maybe, inserted the B-word because they thought it would help to sell the book. Which no doubt it does. Because brutalism, once the encapsulation in three-and-a-half syllables of everything thought hateful about modern architecture, a word whose inventors didn’t even want to sound nice, is now exciting, sexy, intriguing. Which could have been predicted: baroque and gothic were once also terms of abuse.

Owen Hatherley has done more than most to bring about this reappraisal, and this year further pushed the boundaries of received taste with Landscapes of Communism (Allen Lane), a loving exploration of the housing estates, TV towers and bureaucratic palaces built by eastern bloc countries in the Soviet era. It has the merit of confronting you with an alternative reality – in this case a different version of 20th-century architecture – to the one you thought you knew. The book is the outcome of epic travelling through places most architecture writers never visit. It also tries, with varying degrees of success, to reconcile Hatherley’s beliefs that both communism and modernism have been wrongly written off.

Challenging modern architecture from another direction was Sharon Rotbard’s White City, Black City (Pluto), in which the much-admired “Bauhaus”-style houses of Tel Aviv are attacked as agents of the colonisation and impoverishment of the Arab city of Jaffa. These works of progressive European intelligence, he argues, are actually instruments of conquest. Taken together, Rotbard and Hatherley show the relationship of buildings to politics to be a slippery but nonetheless vital aspect of architecture.

Handsome, well-researched, substantial tomes thudded on to the shelves: a thoroughly revised edition of William Curtis’s Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (Phaidon), and two magnificent catalogues, The World of Charles and Ray Eames and Latin America in Construction (both Thames & Hudson), which accompanied exhibitions of the same name at the Barbican in London and MoMA in New York. The latter, like Hatherley’s book, opened up new perspectives on modernism, by looking beyond the well-known monuments of Oscar Niemeyer that tend to dominate perceptions of Latin American architecture.

There were shorter, more individualistic studies of British architects from longer ago. Gavin Stamp’s Gothic for the Steam Age (Aurum Press) was on the prodigiously productive George Gilbert Scott, whose practice splattered almost every part of Britain with churches and other important structures in a gothic revival style. Owen Hopkins’s From the Shadows (Reaktion) is the liveliest account yet of Nicholas Hawksmoor, the amazing baroque architect of the early 18th century. Had he but known it, Hawksmoor was a proto-brutalist, his un-pretty and confronting forms being an inspiration to British architects in the mid-20th century.

Melancholy and Architecture (Park Books), by Diogo Seixas Lopes, studies a neglected aspect of a profession that usually likes to be upbeat, and an architect, Aldo Rossi, who died in 1997, and who explored such matters. But of all these the book I found most immediately gratifying was Making Do and Getting By (Walther König), by the artist Richard Wentworth, which is a series of photographs of unintended and incongruous details of city streets: signs, pipes, graffiti, discarded coffee cups, road painting, bodged repairs, misplaced adverts, exiled teddy bears. This is not architecture as usually considered, but it is hugely revealing of the ways life in cities is revealed through their physical fabric.

• This article was amended on 7 December 2015. An earlier version of the sub-heading referred to the Eames brothers, rather than husband and wife Charles and Ray Eames.

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