Customer Reviews

The Architectural Guidebook to New York City

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The most obvious reason to replace the AIA Guide with this book is size. Dealing with only one borough enables the author to go into more detail while reducing the size of the book. The AIA Guide is about half the size of a large yellow pages. The Architectural Guidebook to NYC is about the size of an average novel. That makes a big difference when you're stuffing it into your backpack or purse for a trip on subway or foot.

The more extensive entries are very welcome. In Union Square with this book and a view of the surrounding buildings, I was able to spend a pleasant and informative hour on a park bench, for free. That's a better bargain than the Staten Island Ferry.

Morrone keeps the architect's jargon to a minimum and knows his subject well. The historical insights and views on clashing aesthetics were skillfully presented. He pointed out a couple of museums of very high caliber that I wasn't even aware of. A book like this is a perfect jumping off point for thousands of topics, from neighborhoods to cultures to politics to construction.

I would encourage him to write similar books on the other buroughs, or better yet, an even more detailed work on each of the neighborhoods of Manhattan: each of them has at least a thousand buildings worth writing about.

This book is really good and best used if you have a fair amount of time to wander around New York. It is like trailing through the city with a friend who has lived there for a long time; Marrone has great excursive lengthy interesting descriptions of a number of buildngs, and that's great. The problem is that each chapter has its own tiny map, and they are never put together in a larger overall map anywhere, making navigation difficult. If you have a lot of time, and want to do just a few buidings per day, that's fine. If you want to storm through NYC and see as much as possible in a limited amount of time, if is difficult.

I was a bit disapointed by this book. There is information on a lot of NY buildings, but the information does not always concern architecture and is usually very limited. Gives you an impression of all there is to see, but does not do much more than that. Photographs are not impressive. Much more intersting is The Architecture of New York City, by Donald Martin Reynolds.

Although I was looking forward to receiving my copy of the Architectural Guidebook to New York City, I was stunned to find that the photographs taken for this guidebook make New York look like nineteenth-century London. I wonder whether the misguided photographer James Iska thought he was producing some romanticized notion of New York that the publishers out in Utah felt was artistic. It is maddening. In an architectural guidebook, one should be able to see the buildings, not to mention as many details as possible. Some of the buildings can barely be made out at all, much less any details. In many cases, one gets only the impression of a monolith rising in the air. Very poor photography. The Seagram building, which I studied in a course, cannot be discerned differentiating from many other edifices for the darkness of the photo, as is the general situation here. And by the way, although the text and photos have an updated 2002 copyright, most of the photos look as if they were taken in the 1950s and are woefully out of date, as can be discerned in some photos by the cars and bystanders. In addition, some of the buildings have been redesigned since these photos (Morgan Library for example), Bowery Bank no longer exists (for many years in fact), and all in all, I find this book a huge disappointment. I wish I had ordered the latest edition of the AIA book, which is excellent.