The North Atlantic Cities - Softcover

Duff, Charles B.; Garvin, Alexander

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908457538 ISBN 13: 9781908457530

Publisher: The Bluecoat Press, 2023

Synopsis

• Great insight on urban development and urban life through the lens of architecture
• Spans across 400 years of architecture and development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States

The North Atlantic Cities by Charles B. Duff is a book on urban development and urban life masquerading as a book on architecture. It is the story of 400 years of architecture and urban development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland and the United States, particularly cities like New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, to name a few.

The author starts with a kind of building few others have considered - the row house, which could very well be the key to understanding why many of the world’s great cities look and function as they do. From the 1600s to today as the author theorises, this innocuous-seeming housing type is perhaps the antidote to suburban sprawl, urban decay and the worst catastrophes of global climate change.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Duff is a planner, teacher, developer, and historian. In a career of more than 35 years, he has built or rebuilt more than 300 buildings and led the revival of some of Baltimore’s most successful neighbourhoods. He has been President of Jubilee Baltimore, the city’s premier community development nonprofit, since 1987, and has been President of the Baltimore Architecture Foundation. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard University, he lectures widely in America and elsewhere and has taught at Johns Hopkins University. He co-wrote Then and Now: Baltimore Architecture in 2005 and contributed to The Architecture of Baltimore. His translations of two French works on Greek tragedy were published in the US in 2010 and 2012.

From the Back Cover

What do Amsterdam, London, Brooklyn, Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia have in common?
They are all North Atlantic cities. Charles Duff shows how the Dutch invented a new way of building cities in their "Golden Age," the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, and how the Dutch way of building became the normal way of building in the British Isles and on the East Coast of the United States. The key to the Dutch-style North Atlantic city is the row house, and Duff shows how the row house cities on both coasts of the ocean grew and continually adapted the Dutch inheritance to changing conditions - sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Today, as we look for ways to live satisfying lives with a low carbon footprint, the North Atlantic tradition provides a range of models that allow people to have spacious houses while supporting walking-distance retail and robust non-automotive transportation.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Bluecoat Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908457538
• ISBN 13: 9781908457530
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288