The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century: The City in the Twenty-first Century and Beyond - Hardcover

Rykwert, Prof Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297819992 ISBN 13: 9780297819998

Publisher: Orion, 2000

Synopsis

Edition; 1st. Physical description; xii, 283 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. Notes; Bibliography: p. [259]-267. Summary; Eminent architectural historian, Jospeh Rykwert looks at the complex story of the city since the industrial revolution. He draws on sociology, social, economic and political history and their complex interactions with the history of architecture. Rykwert's knowledge of world cities is remarkable, and the book will draw on Shanghai as much as Los Angeles, Rio as well as London, Melbourne as well as Paris, both in looking at past developments and for models for the future. His book is also a timely celebration of metropolitan values that have recently been denigrated: tolerance, liberalism, cultural vitality, pluralism. It is an important book that no-one with an interest in urban living can ignore. Subjects; Cities and towns. Architecture. City planning. Architecture - History. Cities and towns - History. Sociology, Urban. Urban economics. City of London. Mexico City. Berlin. Urban sociology. Urban areas. Public open spaces. Streets. Landscape. City, The. Architecture, Modern - 19th/20th centuries. Urban sociology. Architecture ; Urban communities ; Social & cultural history ; Economic history. Architecture / General. Social Science / Sociology / Urban. History / Social History. Business & Economics / Economic History. Cities and towns ; History ; Urban economics ; Sociology, Urban ; Architecture. Genres; Bibliography. Illustrated.

About this title

Review

The subtitle to this, the tenth book by architecture professor (and lively writer) Joseph Rykwert--namely, "The City in the Twenty-First Century and Beyond"--is a whopping misnomer. It is only in the final chapter that Rykwert pays attention (and briskly, even then) to urban developments of recent years and to what we might expect in the 100 years to come. What this book really is, despite what its subtitlers intended, is at once a broad-ranging and satisfyingly detailed social history of some of the great cities of the modern world (mostly the Western one, with a marked emphasis on the two cities Rykwert calls home--New York and London--plus Paris) and an inquiry into how well they have served the material and spiritual lives of the people who inhabit them.

Ranging comfortably and coherently back and forth between the Old World and the New, Rykwert begins with the Industrial Revolution, its factories, the throngs of poor country people that flooded the cities to work in them, and the subsequent 150-year challenge faced by urban centres to house, transport and entertain these throngs cheaply, space-consciously and hygienically. But Seduction of Place is not so much a people's history of the city as it is a vibrantly researched and chronicled play-by-play of the big public--and some private--works of the major metropolises. The book also tackles the luminaries--including Haussmann, Olmstead and Vaux, L'Enfant, and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (who pioneered the enduring school of axial planning at Paris' Ecole Polytechnique)--whose names are often uttered in the same breath as the parks, boulevards and edifices they brought to life.

Social critics like Tocqueville, Marx, Engels, Fourier and Ruskin are just as well represented here, however, ably providing the basis for Rykwert's persistent question of what cities ought to be and how responses to that have diverged and evolved over the years, apart from what they have become, for better or ill, and how they got that way. Even though the book takes a more or less familiar course through the 20th century--from the emergence of subways, skyscrapers, and modernism through post-war urban planning, suburban sprawl, and subsequent urban decay and attempts at renewal--Rykwert knows when to dart away from well-known people, places and things to chronicle the planning of lesser-known English "New Towns" or of distinctly 20th-century cities like New Delhi, Islamabad, Australia's Canberra, and--rather famously--Brasilia, the ultimate "zoned" city.

The final chapter pays the requisite nod to the postmodernist implications of, for example, Celebration, Florida, (Disney's controversial new spin on the "company town") but is really distinguished by Rykwert's startlingly on-the-mark reading of how such wildly popular mega-museums as the new international Guggenheim franchise (with Gehry's Bilbao "branch" currently eclipsing Wright's New York "flagship") have come to best personify the encroachment of corporate globalisation in the urban civic realm. It is a fitting conclusion for a book that manages so gracefully to wed an engrossing history of urban growth with the deeper intellectual, cultural and ethical questions it raises--the very questions that the speculators, preservationists and "ordinary citizens" will still have to answer in creating and sustaining the great cities of the 21st century. --Timothy Murphy

Book Description

A brilliant account of the changing face of the modern city: its expansion, success, failings and the key challenges facing it in the future.

Edition details

• Publisher: Orion
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0297819992
• ISBN 13: 9780297819998
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 252