Although he has hitherto remained somewhat overlooked, Hugo Haring was a key figure of the Modern Movement, first as secretary of the Ring, the principal organisation for Modernists in the 1920s, and second as the main theorist for the Organic stream in German architecture. Trained at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart under Theodor Fischer, Haring's career as a Modernist began when he moved to Berlin in 1921. There he was befriended by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose office he was invited to share, and this became a centre of debate for the new direction in architecture. The two architects set up the Ring, which by 1926 included every German Modernist of note. Its members dominated the WeiBenhofsiedlung of 1927, for which Mies was artistic director, and its success also prepared the way for the CIAM congresses, which Haring attended as Ring representative. Despite their political collaboration, Haring and Mies pursued projects in increasingly opposed directions, clarifying each other's position by contrast. Mies pursued general solutions and repeated types, advocating rational construction and flexibility of use, while Haring sought the utmost specificity to function and place - which meant that each building, even each element of a building, deserved to develop its own individual form. The key example was Gut Garkau near Lubeck of 1924/25, with its cowshed of a pear shaped plan devised around the requirements and rituals of farming.

Professor Blundell Jones was trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London, from 1966 to 1972. He has been involved in practice, criticism and teaching for most of his professional life, but the balance between these activities has gradually changed in favour of a concentration on architectural history and theory. In 1973-74 he wrote his first book on the German architect Hans Scharoun (1893-1972), and he has remained a leading expert on this area of German Architecture, producing a second book on Scharoun and another on his colleague and mentor Hugo Haring (1882-1958). After some experience of practice and of part-time teaching in London, he was appointed Assistant Lecturer at Cambridge in 1978, and ten years later he joined the Architecture Department of the South Bank Polytechnic, now South Bank University, as Principal Lecturer in charge of history and theory, being promoted to Reader in 1992. He was appointed Professor at Sheffield in August 1994.

Professor Blundell Jones has enjoyed a close working relationship with The Architectural Review and other leading architectural magazines. He has published numerous articles on historical and theoretical subjects besides criticising and analysing contemporary work. He received the CICA Award for the 'Best periodical of the last three years' in June 1985, and was made 'Architectural Journalist of the Year' in 1992 for articles on Louis Kahn and on Authenticity in the Architects' Journal. He has written extensively on the English Arts and Crafts movement, on the Swedish architects Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, on the German firm Gunter Behnisch and partners, and on the recent architectural movement in Graz, Austria resulting in the book Dialogues in Time. He has also written a revisionary history of the Modern Movement under the title Modern Architecture through Case Studies. His interest in the relationship between buildings and society has prompted contacts with anthropologists, and he anticipates further inter-disciplinary work of this kind in developing a theory of architecture.

Professor Blundell Jones sits on Research and Policy committees in the School of Architecture. He is also a member of the international architectural critics organisation CICA, of the RIBA Professional Publications Committee and he is on the editorial board of the periodical Architectural Research Quarterly.