Archive for Book Review
October 28, 2009 · Filed under Book Review, Creative Cities, Heritage, Public Life, Urbanization
John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it’s not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is “braced for objections” over his selections for “The Great Cities in History,” a collection of essays and images. He anticipates that readers will ask, for instance, why Timbuktu is included and not Toronto, why Meroe (an ancient Nubian city) is included and not Melbourne. It’s a dull question, and Norwich answers it dully, by pointing to the “in history” part of the book’s title. The better answer would have been that there’s not a shred of romance in Toronto and Melbourne.
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Popularity: 37% [?]
July 21, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Artificial Landscapes, Book Review, Multi-Level Urbanism, Urban Structure, Visualization
From Gotham City to Mega City One, the Architects’ Journal presents a selection of the greatest illustrated urban spaces.
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Popularity: 51% [?]
July 13, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Artificial Landscapes, Book Review, Ecosystems, Mobility, Modernism, Planning, Urban Structure
In the late 1960s, a tall and ungainly Englishman named Peter Reyner Banham brought his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion. It helped that, as a visiting architecture professor (Banham was teaching at USC), he was given some pretty fancy digs: He stayed in Greene & Greene’s Gamble house in Pasadena, one of the most beautiful and romantic houses in America. So Banham had a privileged base from which to explore. But what he went looking for, and the way he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the way the intellectual world — and then the wider world — perceived the city.
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Popularity: 54% [?]
June 3, 2009 · Filed under Active Transportation, Book Review, Cycling, Traffic
Full disclosure: I’ve ridden a bike around New York as my principal means of transport for 30 years, so I’m inclined to sympathize with the idea that a cycling revolution is upon us, and that it’s a good thing. Like Jeff Mapes, the author of “Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities,” I’ve watched the streets fill over the years with more and varied bike riders. It’s no longer just me, some food delivery guys and a posse of reckless messengers. Far from it.
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Popularity: 36% [?]
May 15, 2009 · Filed under Architecture, Book Review, Urban Design
Despite a number of monographs, including the mammoth Paul Rudolph: Architectural Drawings with its terrifyingly detailed, Piranesi-esque images, Paul Rudolph’s architecture is not easy to fully comprehend. Paradoxically, it could be argued that precisely because of the unsparingly detailed drawings of complex plans and sections, the tendency is to be overwhelmed rather than enlightened. Rudolph’s architecture is as densely “architectural” as it comes.
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Popularity: 36% [?]
May 6, 2009 · Filed under Book Review, Urban Design
William S. Saunders, editor of Harvard Design Magazine, and GSD professor Alex Krieger, collaborated on the new book Urban Design, which asks prominent architects, landscape architects, and planners to take stock of the field of urban design—how it’s evolved, where it’s fallen short, and what its purpose should be. I visited Saunders in his Cambridge office recently to get his take on the complex issues presented in the book.
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Popularity: 31% [?]
January 29, 2009 · Filed under Book Review, EcoCities
Australia and America share many cultural similarities. Among them: roots in Great Britain, a “New World” legacy of both optimism and exploitation, and a car-centric culture. But while Australia has become a trailblazer on the path to sustainable urban development, the United States still has much to learn. Sustainable Communities expert Timothy Beatley, who has previously chronicled sustainable urban development in Europe in the book Green Urbanism, now turns an eye toward Australia and the lessons it can share with the United States in his 2009 release, Green Urbanism Down Under.
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Popularity: 31% [?]
January 17, 2009 · Filed under Book Review
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, University of Massachusetts professor Max Page was proofreading a proposal for an exhibit at a New York museum about a subject he knew well — the destruction of New York City.
Page, who teaches architecture and history at the university’s Amherst campus, had recently published a scholarly work on slum clearance and city planning in Manhattan from 1900 to 1940 — what he calls the “regular destruction of a capitalist city.”
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Popularity: 28% [?]
January 12, 2009 · Filed under Book Review, Infrastructure
Edited by network theorist Kazys Varnelis, the book’s authors seek to clarify the role of infrastructure in shaping the contemporary metropolitan environment as well as illuminate its inherent weaknesses. Focused on Los Angeles, Varnelis and his writers slowly pick away at the popular misconception among architects that what they produce in urban environments actually affects the way in which cities perform.
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Popularity: 29% [?]
January 12, 2009 · Filed under Book Review, Urban Actions
actions: what you can do with the city’ exhibition catalogue
The writing’s not great, and the title isn’t exactly a grabber, but every city dweller in every city should read this book.
The name, Actions: What You Can Do With The City, says all and reveals little. Yet this volume could change the world, or at least its urban centres.
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Popularity: 31% [?]
