Book Description
Politics and culture are at once semi-autonomous and intertwined. Nowhere is this more revealingly illustrated than in urban design, a field that encompasses architecture and social life, traditions and modernization. Here aesthetic goals and political intentions meet, sometimes in collaboration, sometimes in conflict. Here the formal qualities of art confront the complexities of history. When urban design policies are implemented, they reveal underlying aesthetic, cultural, and political dilemmas with startling clarity.
Gwendolyn Wright focuses on three French colonies—Indochina, Morocco, and Madagascar—that were the most discussed, most often photographed, and most admired showpieces of the French empire in the early twentieth century. She explores how urban policy and design fit into the French colonial policy of "association," a strategy that accepted, even encouraged, cultural differences while it promoted modern urban improvements that would foster economic development for Western investors. Wright shows how these colonial cities evolved, tracing the distinctive nature of each locale under French imperialism. She also relates these cities to the larger category of French architecture and urbanism, showing how consistently the French tried to resolve certain stylistic and policy problems they faced at home and abroad.
With the advice of architects and sociologists, art historians and geographers, colonial administrators sought to exert greater control over such matters as family life and working conditions, industrial growth and cultural memory. The issues Wright confronts—the potent implications of traditional norms, cultural continuity, modernization, and radical urban experiments—still challenge us today.
Book Description
Showing how New Urbanism is simply American urbanism as it has been evolving since the nineteenth century, this is a history not of what has been achieved but rather of what planners have sought to achieve--a history of the quest for good cities.
In her survey of the last hundred or so years of urbanist ideals, the author identifies four approaches to city-making, which she terms "cultures": incrementalism, plan-making, planned communities, and regionalism. She shows how these cultures connect, overlap, and conflict one with another and how most of the ideas about building better settlements are so recurrent.
She concludes with an assessment of the successes and failures of the four cultures and the need to integrate these ideas as a means to promoting good urbanism in America.
Book Description
Over the past few decades, many American architects have reclaimed urban and suburban land development as an important, contemporary architectural issue. This renewed interest in "town planning" focuses on the relationships between buildings and open spaces that form urban patterns. These architects argue that a range of appropriate urban patterns organized into neighborhoods can best meet the physical and social needs of residents and restore a sense of community. Architecture and urbanism, in this view, are instrumental agents of social change and reform.
The projects in this book demonstrate their attempts to restructure urban growth into cohesive designs that balance buildings, open space, infrastructure, landscape, and transportation. In place of the piecemeal advance of placeless, car-dominated suburban sprawl, they envision dense, mixed-use neighborhoods with walkable streets, and connections to transit. The work ranges from entire new towns to urban infill. Many of the architects practicing these ideas have formed a movement called the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU), which most clearly and effectively has articulated this alternative vision.
This book is about particular tendencies, however, and not ownership of ideas. Although the Congress for New Urbanism presents its position in the proprietary form of a charter, its vision is representative of much broader strains of architectural ideology, and continues a twentieth-century search to find ways to address the problems of the modern city. New Urbanism is merely the latest movement to seek alternative forms to reshape society. In this way, it can be seen as a continuation of modernism, not its antithesis.
Although much has been written recently about the American revival of town-planning in general, and the New Urbanism in particular, much of the writing consists of either partisan claims of New Urbanism's ability to rebuild American community or facile dismissals of the movement as nostalgia-peddling suburbanism. This book presents readers a chance to judge the ideas and work for themselves, and to participate in the debate over alternative forms of the contemporary city.
Customer Reviews:
not for beginners.......2002-01-24
As another reviewer suggests, this book is no doubt useful for architects and planners, because it covers the mundane details of building developments that accommodate non-motorists. But it is very dry, hardly a book for someone getting his or her feet wet in this area.
very useful guideline for planning.......2001-10-30
Since I quickly reviewed this book first time,I found and believe that it's will be useful guideline for us on planning process.The most important info in back of this book showing so many diagrams to help us chek our planning very easily and fast.These info including general section of streets,developement of several cities,planning process,relationship between building type and density,analysis of public streetscape,neighborhood scale,block figues and transet zoning...After getting these analysis diagrams,I can findout and check suitable block scale and type between different schemes easily and fast on planning working.
It's not nonsense,after reading it you will own it and are unable to hold yourself back.I also recommend it for many friends of mine in Taiwan.
Book Description
This, the first book on Latinos in America from an urban planning/policy perspective, covers the last century, and includes a substantial historical overview the subject. The author traces the movement of Latinos (primarily Chicanos) into American cities from Mexico and then describe the problems facing them in those cities. He then shows how the planning profession and developers consistently failed to meet their needs due to both poverty and racism. Attention is also paid to the most pressing concerns in Latino barrios during recent times, including environmental degradation and justice, land use policy, and others. The book closes with a consideration of the issues that will face Latinos as they become the nation's largest minority in the 21st century. Also includes six maps.
Book Description
For most of his career, architect Mario Gandelsonas has been exploring the American city through his writings, designs, lectures, and, above all, through a series of remarkable analytical drawings. X-Urbanism raises questions about the form of the city by examining various configurations of urban space, analyzing them in ways that blur the traditional opposition between figure and ground. This title serves as a visual lexicon of the formal properties of American urbanism-fabric, void, grid, wall-that reveal the hidden structure of the cities New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, New Haven, Des Moines, and Atlantic City. In the process, X-Urbanism confounds our expectations: it shows us the subtle order of chaotic Los Angeles, and the disruptions of New York's rigorous grid.
?X-Urbanism carefully reproduces Gandelsonas's drawings, which range from crisp, elegant pen-and-ink to colorful computer renderings and are as beautiful as they are instructive.
Customer Reviews:
Well done........1999-09-14
It is a rare moment when text and image collaborate to tell a story that could be told by neither alone. X-Urbanism is one of these moments. The dialog between the writing and drawings in this book is brilliant. The ultimate result of the conversation between the two is a nuanced understanding of the relationship that cities have with the subconscious of their inhabitants.
An inspired analysis of the city's marriage to fantasy........1999-07-29
Both eloquently and clearly, X-Urbanism explores the historical and continuing development of the American City through the lens of an eye opening thesis: fantasy and desire have been pivotal factors in the shaping of Urban Space. As the author illustrates, the implications of this point of departure reach far beyond the conventional boundaries of urban studies to include a wealth of other disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, and popular culture. Through the course of this book, the affects of fantasy on the Renaissance City, the Baroque City, the Modern City, and the Post-modern City are charted. Without being dogmatic or judgmental, Mr. Gandelsonas frames the City as a simultaneous object and subject that is influenced by the desires of architects while also influencing its inhabitants with its own wishes.
After reading the text and viewing the drawings that conclude this book it was as though I was walking around an object that until now I had only understood from a stationary position.
This book is a must read for anyone who lives inside or outside of a city.
Missed Opportunity.......1999-04-13
When I picked up this book I was truly impressed. It is extremely high quality, ambitious and far reaching which makes it all the more sinister that the numerous emerging architects whose drawings comprise the most interesting aspect of this book, remain (perhaps strategically?) anonymous. Amazon's own description of the book is a perfect example of how easily the uncredited drawings can be misinterpreted as the work of Mr. Gandelsonas. If this were a purposeful issue of anonymity, I could possibly understand. However, Mies, Corbu and the likes are happily credited throughout the book. So what gives?
As a reader, book collector and architecture enthusiast, I like to use my books on the subject of design as reference material. Unfortunately, I am a little uncomfortable with the deliberate name omissions in X-Urbanism.
I would not recommend purchasing this book unless a massive erratum is installed in every single copy.
Average customer rating:
- Great local history lesson
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From Cottage to Bungalow: Houses and the Working Class in Metropolitan Chicago, 1869-1929 (Chicago Architecture and Urbanism)
Joseph C. Bigott
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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The Chicago Bungalow (IL) (GEN)
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Chicagoland: City and Suburbs in the Railroad Age (Historical Studies of Urban America)
ASIN: 0226048756 |
Book Description
It's hard to overestimate the complexity of the factors that dictate something as simple as where, and in what sorts of structures, people live. Urban planning, business, labor, ethnicity, architecture—each influences the types of structures people live in, and the sorts of lives they lead within them.
Joseph C. Bigott takes on all of these fields in From Cottage to Bungalow, a sophisticated study of domestic structures and ethnic working-class neighborhoods in Chicago during the critical period of 1869 to 1929, when the city attracted huge numbers of immigrants. Exploring the meaning of home ownership in this context, Bigott develops two case studies that combine the intimate lives of ordinary people (primarily in Chicago's Polish and German communities) with broad analysis of everything from real estate markets to the very carpentry practices used to construct houses. His progressive methods and the novel conclusions they support chronicle not only the history of housing in Chicago, but also the organizations of people's lives, and the ways in which housing has affected notions of who is—and who is not—a worthy American citizen.
Customer Reviews:
Great local history lesson.......2003-10-07
I started genealogy research for our family this summer. Our ancestors hail from the Hammond and West Hammond areas featured in the book. The author does far more than merely focusing on the housing designs. He provides an interesting look back at the social, political, and economical climate the immigrants / early settlers lived in. The Notes section is packed with references and has proved to be invaluable as I continue my family history and local history research. I can only hope the author chooses to pick up where this book left off.
Book Description
Winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians
When the magnificent Auditorium Building opened on Chicago's Michigan Avenue in December 1889, it marked Chicago's emergence both as the leading city of the Midwest and as a metropolis of international stature. In this lavishly illustrated book, Joseph M. Siry explores not just the architectural history of the Auditorium Building but also the crucial role it played in Chicago's social history. Covering the Auditorium from the early design stage to its opening, its later renovations, its links to culture and politics in Chicago, and its influence on later Adler and Sullivan works (including the Schiller Building and the Chicago Stock Exchange Building), this volume recounts the fascinating tale of a building that helped to define a city and an era.
Book Description
Reporting from the frontlines of gentrification in San Francisco's Mission District, Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg deplore the skyrocketing rents and corporate buyouts that may be coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
In a letter to the San Francisco Bay Guardian's sex column 'Ask Isadora' a masochist wrote in to ask whether he really had to obey his dominatrix by sexually servicing their ancient landlord. Though the letter was on the surface about the extent to which a bottom's erotic obedience must go, it was really about what so much of here is about nowadays—rent." Reporting from the front line of gentrification in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit examines the consequences when artists' love for space and authenticity in working-class areas, and rich peoples' love for the fashionable bohemia of artists' neighborhoods, are combined. The Mission, for instance, with its easier access to Silicon Valley, has become a standoff between hi tech's nouveaux riches and existing residents under threat from spiraling rents, including supporters of the Yuppie Eradication Project who advocate vandalizing expensive cars and restaurants in retaliation. Solnit is rueful about the decision by cities like San Francisco to increase their admission charges so that poor people, artists, and writers like herself can no longer afford to live in the inner city. Drawing on architectural history, contemporary urban studies, and vivid first-hand description, and enriched by the telling images of Susan Schwartzenberg, a photographer who weaves together her own work with older pictures to create complex portraits of place. Hollow City projects the end of city life for bohemians and its baleful consequences for American culture. 50 b/w photographs.
Customer Reviews:
outraged.......2006-03-22
I was outraged when I read this book... but not in the way you would think.
Published in 2002, this book is already quite dated. Now that it is 2006 and the dotcom boom has become the dotcom bust, this author's hysteria over gentrification and urban renewal in San Francisco-- all blamed on the dotcom phenomenon, mind you-- has been proven to be unfounded. In fact, in relative terms rents are more affordable now than they were back in 2002.
Where to start? This book is simply a long list of gripes and sour grapes about how San Francisco has gotten too expensive for spoiled "bohemians" to live in because they don't want to work. Perhaps most galling is how Solnit puts urban "artists" at the top of her self-righteous hierarchy of those who "deserve" to live in the City. Urban professionals are likened to "dirty old men" who follow around the innocent "schoolgirls" who supposedly are the artists.
The crux of the problem is that in her myopic, NIMBY-istic viewpoint, Solnit fails to acknowledge the fact that space in San Francisco has ALWAYS been severely limited. The city itself is only about 49 square miles and it has ALWAYS been expensive... it has always gone through change, sometimes rapid. Manhattan is the center of a worldclass, GREAT city. How does she think all of those tall skyscrapers got there? When Solnit mourns the loss of an unused, empty lot to development, I have to laugh.
You will find that the author considers herself a "radical" and associates with the originator of "Critical Mass", a regular, planned, and deliberate snarling of local traffic by disgruntled people on bikes. She also is in league with a local carmudgeon in the Mission who, over perceived "gentrification" in the neighborhood, put up fliers encouraging others to vandalize expensive cars on the street.
With an attitude like this, it's not hard to dislike such people as these who arrogantly call themselves "radicals" and "bohemians". All the while they are complaining about the high cost of living in SF (join the club!), they petulantly claim that to get a REAL job would compromise their ideals.
Give me a break.
The author also makes the extremely simplistic assumption that all "true" artists are by nature poor or "downwardly mobile".
I have news for the author-- San Francisco is-- and always has been-- made up mainly of hardworking people. This city was built upon that industriousness, ingenuity, and enterprise. Art has its place, but none of it would be possible without those taxpayers who HAVE JOBS. As a property tax paying citizen of the city I love, I resent her and her ilk assuming that it is their right to inexpensive or free rent in one of the most desirable places to live IN THE WORLD.
The thing that amazes me is the fact she can't see that it has ALWAYS been that way... for decades and decades. I had to laugh at the idea that this book actually mentioned a parody of how, in the height of anti-gentrification hysteria, the last Mexican would soon move out of the Mission.
Guess that was a wrong guess, eh?
Finally, as if it were a suprise, the author in her closing acknowledgments thanks, among a number of other parties, both Critical Mass and "the bar at Place Pigalle" where some of the work for the book apparently took place. I wonder if it ever felt vaguely hypocritical to the author to be condemning urban development and trumpeting the plight of the poor over $8 glasses of Belgian ale?
Extremists on either side are self-absorbed, self-righteous, and unrealistic in the extreme. I strongly disagree with everything George Bush stands for, but at least he doesn't have the gall and arrogance to assume such an air of superiority over the rest of us, especially those of us who actually work for a living. I only agree with the author over one point: idiots who drive big SUVs in the narrow streets of San Francisco are idiots. Other than that, I plan to continue enjoying San Francisco as a San Franciscan who does their fair share to keep this city vibrant, alive, and relevant. Let others stew in their own sour grapes.
this book has its points, but..........2004-09-15
This book has an interesting subject and lovely photography. I am sympathetic to the plight of gentrification. However, the tone of this feels as though she were a professional complainer. Neighborhoods change, that is a fact of life. The residents who were displaced in this book were undoubtedly not the same residents from the time it was built. You get the sense that the author feels like everything about every neighborhood is worth saving. It isn't. I'm not going to cry about a neighborhood with less crime. And what solutions are offered? Should one never try to improve a distressed neighborhood, so that no one ever has to move? What sort of building *should* be allowed in a city? Ms. Solnit has some very valid points in this book, but she comes off as anti-change and not really offering anything close to a solution, other than fossilizing San Francisco in the "good old days", whenever that was for her.
Shallow City: History of Its Flux from Origins to Eternity.......2003-03-28
The historical journey Solnit takes through the reoccurring demise of San Francisco's bohemian culture only leads to sob stories in the end and does little for her cause. Remember, these now run-down neighborhoods and homes were expensive and new when first built 100 years ago. Yes, it's horrible that in our time the materially rich are pushing the spiritually rich out of the city, but the book only shows that artists will one day come back again. It may not be the same as when we first came, but that's life - nothing stays the same.
A mild success.......2002-05-31
Although Rebecca Solnit writes with a deliberate and sometimes myopic agenda, her style is extraordinarily effective in evoking sympathy. It is elegaic in nature and the entire book reads as a eulogy, a fact reinforced by the shuttered structures and funeral processions presented in Schwatzenberg's photo essays. The digressions into such realms as the origins of Bohemia don't seem irrelevant or excessive but merely an extension of the beauty of the writing and presentation.
Although the issue has become less pressing with the collapse of the fervor of the internet economy, it should be noted the type of mass evictions in favour of live/work lofts is still a common occurrence in San Francisco, and that housing is still beyond the means of many ordinary San Franciscans. Despite the less fervent pace of gentrification, those in the funeral procession presented in the opening pages will not be returning to their homes; the character of their neighbourhood will not be restored.
The work is a mild success. Although somewhat obsolescent, it is still relevant, whether because of its still necessary impressions on the hearts of those who read it, or as a presentation of a historical phenomenon. But furthermore, as a literary work, and as a visual work, it is beautiful both in its prose and photography.
DOA.......2001-03-18
Well now that the dot com bubble has burst volume II can be the eviction of gentrification.
Books:
- The Psychology of Animal Learning
- The Simple Home: The Luxury of Enough (American Institute Architects)
- The Teachings of Padmasambhava (Brill's Indological Library, Vol 12)
- The Writings of Florence Scovel Shinn: The Game of Life and How to Play It, Your Word Is Your Wand,the Secret Door to Success, the Power of the Spok
- Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Design Briefs)
- Tiffany at auction
- Total Construction Project Management
- Twentieth-Century Russian and East European Painting: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
- Twentieth-Century Russian and East European Painting: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
- Urban Planning Conservation and Preservation
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