City Transformed: Urban Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century [Hardcover]

Kenneth Powell (Author), Ken Powell (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If the great cities of the world (and a few of the smaller ones) were to come together to conceive a vast international PR campaign that promoted the 21st-century renaissance of the urban center, they could have no more dazzling a view book than this broadly and intelligently conceived compendium of major recent or in-progress projects in 25 different metropolises, from New York, Dallas, and Seattle to London, Paris, Rotterdam, and Bilbao to Kobe, Ho Chi Minh City, and Kuala Lumpur. Rest assured that, somewhere, Jane Jacobs is smiling on City Transformed, which takes as its unifying theme the notion that the postwar urban-planning movement--which destroyed so many lovely, old, walkable city neighborhoods in the interest of brutishly scaled public works or astoundingly ugly "affordable" high-rise housing--has been replaced with the embrace of density, pluralism, mixed-use design, and historic preservation as the chief assets of the reviving, dweller-friendly city--a reclamation of its soul, as it were.

To those ends, the book is divided into four sections: the "healing" of cities that have been scarred by war, poverty or natural disaster (Dallas's Victory District; Berlin's Potsdamer Platz; and the Temple Bar district of newly affluent Dublin, often called its "Marais"); attempts to create new economic and residential life in neglected areas (London's much-chronicled Canary Wharf; and master plans for Ho Chi Minh City's "Saigon South" and for the "new town" of Almere, near Amsterdam); new or extended modes of urban transit (Bilbao's roomy and terrific-looking new metro system, just one of the boomlet of projects that accompanied Frank Gehry's already-legendary Bilbao Guggenheim Museum); and the introduction or revival of various cultural centers (the reconstruction-modernization of London's much-loved Royal Opera House in Covent Garden; and Dominique Perrault's Bibliothèque nationale de France, one of the grands projets to be initiated under the Mitterrand regime, and the centerpiece of a wave of recent development to bring life to Paris's shunned Rive Gauche).

Unfortunately, many of the projects that are featured here, so smartly explained by architectural critic and journalist Kenneth Powell (who has written monographs on the work of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers), are incomplete, and even the more impressive digitally produced plans (for, say, Tadao Ando's Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art in Kobe) can't capture the color-photographed excitement and drama of such fully executed projects as Van Berkel & Bos's Erasmus Bridge or Bolles-Wilson's Luxor Cinema, which are two of the funkier structures to emerge amidst the recent renewal of Rotterdam's Kop van Zuid district (or--we might as well say it one more time--of Gehry's new Bilbao Guggenheim, which defies spatial logic and seems more like a fantastic hallucination the longer one looks at it). And, although Powell purports that the overarching goal of such pricey new projects is to reclaim the city for "ordinary" people (i.e., those who are at the "street level"), many of the projects that are featured here are funded by our current transglobal corporate affluence, and it remains to be seen how many of them become true lodestones for the genuine revival of neighborhoods, instead of isolated shows of architectural bravura.

Having said that, City Transformedmade me want to pack a light bag, hop an airplane, and complete a short world tour to see these bold new expressions of urban creativity and interaction up close and personal. If an architectural picture book can make one want to do that, as far as I'm concerned, it's done its job several times over. --Timothy Murphy

From Library Journal

Convinced that successful architecture in cities relies on sound urban-design precepts, Powell (Architecture Reborn: Converting Old Building for New Uses) has assembled an international selection of 25 urban design projects from the 1990s. Summarizing urban-design developments over the past century, the introductory essay includes stimulating observations amid a few puzzling generalizations on the political, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of the modern city. The four main sections of the book address the city in terms of healing, extending, motion, and culture, offering five to eight examples each. The illustrations are informative and often include site plans or models, but information on specific buildings is at times inadequate (omitting names of architects) or incorrect (as when Powell calls the Museum of Jewish Heritage the Holocaust Museum). Perhaps the most informative aspect of the volume is the captioning, while the index is too brief to be really useful. For larger architecture and urban-design collections.APaul Glassman, New York Sch. of Interior Design
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Te Neues Publishing Company; 1St Edition edition (October 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3823854615
• ISBN-13: 978-3823854616
• Product Dimensions: 11.7 x 9.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,958,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Bilbao Effect, August 17, 2006

By 

J. Suau "Museum Quality" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: City Transformed: Urban Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (Hardcover)

I couldn't disagree more with the review posted. As far as urban design and or architectural aestethics, contextualization, etc. is concerned, the Guggenheim Bilbao has had an amazingly positive effect on the city, it's economy, international profile, and cultural tourists, beyond all predictions, because of the stark contrast to the urban and rural panorama.

If you haven't made the mecca trip to Bilbao, the "effect" (just as you turn the corner and see it for the first time) is worth the expense. As to the "functionality" of the architecture - as in the Frank Lloyd Wright building in NYC - I was fortunate enough to have a hard hat tour before the building was completed.

In short, this book presents beautiful international examples of urban planning with good images.

2 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Apparently, you can never have too much concrete, November 17, 2001

By 

saskatoonguy (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City Transformed: Urban Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (Hardcover)

This book documents 25 urban megaprojects, of which 18 are in Europe, 3 in the US, and 4 in Asia. Most page space is given to beautiful color photos and color diagrams, accompanied by text that is unabashedly fawning. Only a few of these projects are designed to be compatible with the surrounding architectural context (Dublin and Lisbon). Others among these projects will probably become important assets to their cities. (I would put Canary Wharf, Battery Park City, and the transportation facilities in this category.) However, what is shocking is how downright ugly most of these projects are, and one wonders if, fifty years hence, they will be regarded as monstrous tumors on the urban fabric. I cringe at such projects as Albeda College (Rotterdam), the Station Quarter (Frankfurt), and some of the buildings of Potsdamer Platz (Berlin). Is there an uglier building on the planet than Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain? Apparently, we have learned nothing from such urban planning fiascos as London's Barbican or Detroit's Renaissance Center.