For the newest installment in its colorful “Fifty” book series, the London Design Museum takes on the world of contemporary architecture. In Fifty Modern Buildings That Changed the World (Conran, $20), museum director Deyan Sudjic offers a lushly illustrated cross section of design from 1851 to the present. The chronology starts with Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace and ends with David Adjaye’s yet-to-be-completed National Museum of African American History and Culture, stopping at greats such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao along the way.

The result is a special compendium of not just great buildings, but great buildings that pushed design forward, decade after decade. Or as Sudjic puts it: “Taken together, they provide not just an account of the individual histories of a sequence of remarkable buildings, but an alternative history of the present.”