Review:
"Busbea's superb synthesis of France's urban utopia in the 60's is the first attempt to map out the entire era that made the future city a cultural reality. Like a phantom limb, the topological model that it offers never quite existed as such, but its presence can be felt all the more keenly that it extends rhizomatically beyond the architectural avant-garde that has long claimed to embody it."--Sylvere Lotringer, Professor of French Literature and Philosophy, Columbia University, and Editor of Semiotext(e) -- Sylvere Lotringer "Larry Busbea offers the first detailed investigation of the extravagant spatial schemes imagined during a fertile decade by a cluster of Paris-based artists, engineers, and architects. Marginalized after the 1968 students' and intellectuals' revolt because of their technocratic accents, these bold designs are skillfully mapped in their ideologies, their ambitions, and their somewhat naive illusions." "Busbea"s superb synthesis of France"s urban utopia in the 60"s is the first attempt to map out the entire era that made the future city a cultural reality. Like a phantom limb, the topological model that it offers never quite existed as such, but its presence can be felt all the more keenly that it extends rhizomatically beyond the architectural avant-garde that has long claimed to embody it."Sylvere Lotringer , Professor of French Literature and Philosophy, Columbia University, and Editor of Semiotext(e) "In our technology-driven present, the French urban utopias of the 1960s come back to haunt us with uncanny poignancy. Larry Busbea's archaeological excavation of the faded urban-architectural dreams of the cybernetic sublime, the integrated spectacle, and the postindustrial spatial environment brilliantly conjures with the ghost of a modernism that has reached the limit point of its faith in total systems of design." Joan Ockman , Director, Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University
About the Author:
Larry Busbea is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Arizona.
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