Global City Blues [Hardcover]

Daniel Solomon (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1559631848 | ISBN-13: 978-1559631846 | Publication Date: June 1, 2003 | Edition: 1

"This is a book about the making of cities and the buildings that compose them. It is about the conditions under which an architect engaged in those activities now works, how those conditions evolved and why they are changing. It is about the qualities of life that are threatened by the ways cities are built at the beginning of the 21st century and intelligent response to those threats. It is about why the city planning ideas and the cultural cuisinart that came in the box with modern architecture are a lingering menace." -- from Global City Blue.

Much of the architecture and town planning of the past fifty years has been based on an unsubstantiated optimism about the promise of modernity. In our rush to embrace the future, we invented new ways of building that rejected the past and sent people headlong into a placeless limbo where they are insulated from each other and cut off from such basic experiences of location as the weather and the time of day. Despite calamitous results, many architects and planners remain enamored of the modernist ideals that underlie these changes.

In Global City Blues, renowned architect Daniel Solomon presents a perceptive overview and an insightful assessment of how the power and seductiveness of modernist ideals led us astray. Through a series of independent but linked essays, he takes the reader on a personal picaresque, introducing us to people, places, and ideas that have shaped thinking about planning and building and that laid the foundation for his beliefs about the world we live in and the kind of world we should be making.

As an alternative, Daniel Solomon discusses the ideas and precepts of New Urbanism, a reform movement he helped found that has risen to prominence in the past decade. New Urbanism offers a vital counterbalance to the forces of sprawl, urban disintegration, and placelessness that have so transformed the contemporary landscape.

Global City Blues is a fresh and original look at what the history of urban form can teach us about creating built environments that work for people.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Influential architect Solomon's lucid collection of essays defines "new urbanism" as fresh architectural thinking meant to restore human scale and a sense of meaning to the places we live and "to reconfigure our daily world so that it is more like the places we seek out when we have the chance, and less like the places that we know deep in our genes do not satisfy everything we long for." Solomon makes compelling arguments about technology, environmentalism, and monument-building star architects and laments the rational modernism of Le Corbusier, under whose influence we helplessly commute in traffic and breathe chilled, shopping-mall air. Today we have the similarly arch, make-it-new polemics of Dutch star Rem Koolhaas. Better, Solomon argues, is architecture that tries to "make the most of the world" while constructing lively, human places fit for social interaction, an approach he finds in a quietly inventive British architect named Michael Hopkins and in some surprisingly urbane, mixed-use oases amid the sprawl of Plano, Texas. Steve Paul
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Review

"This is a book about the making of cities and the buildings that compose them. It is about the conditions under which an architect engaged in those activities now works, how those conditions evolved and why they are changing. It is about the qualities of life that are threatened by the ways cities are built at the beginning of the 21st century and intelligent response to those threats. It is about why the city planning ideas and the cultural cuisinart that came in the box with modern architecture are a lingering menace." - from Global City Blues

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Island Press; 1 edition (June 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559631848
• ISBN-13: 978-1559631846
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,571,131 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Saying it like it is!, June 30, 2003

By A Customer

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This review is from: Global City Blues (Hardcover)

I found this book to be so refreshing. Daniel Solomon is an architect and urban designer who writes eloquently and passionately about how cities get built and the huge forces to be overcome if we are to regain civility and harmony with our environment. His writing is funny and perceptive, taking to task the pretensions of Modernist dogma and the way our profession has been taught for the last fifty years. He writes about the need for 'background architecture' to repair the urban fabric and the idea of urbanism as a way of looking at our built environment.
There are some fascinating stories about his home city of San Francisco and the fight to pull down the ugly urban freeways built during the 60's.
The book is essential reading for urban designers and policy makers and all who care about cities and how they are built.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a refreshing breeze of humanity in a nihilistic world, November 17, 2004

By 

David Greusel "urban architect" (Kansas City, MO United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Global City Blues (Hardcover)

Solomon's book was just the tonic I needed to regain my faith in the real value of the design professions. I had begun to despair that I was the only person who found the Prada posing of Rem Koolhaas and his ilk reminded me ever so much of the children's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." Solomon is apparently another like-minded soul, though his book touches on so much more than the soulless modernism that pervades the design professsion (esp. the academy and the press) today. A committed urbanist, Solomon attempts to show that a very few showoff buildings may have their place in a city, but that a city cannot be made of Frank Gehry monuments. And most especially not of imitation Frank Gehry monuments! He writes with wit, passion, and clarity, three qualities that are often in short supply in tomes by architects. Major kudos to the author, and a strong "buy" recommendation to the reader.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why urban design matters, July 4, 2003

By A Customer

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This review is from: Global City Blues (Hardcover)

This is an interesting book about urban design. Mr Solomon explains how the way architecture and urban design have been taught has affected the built environment all over the world and why we need a new school of thought about making cities. The figures he describes as heroes are interesting.. Hopkins, Colin Rowe, some Chinese architect in Beijing, because they have resisted the forces of the media and current trends and have attempted something timeless. The book represents a personal journey by an architect who realizes there is something very wrong about the way our world is evolving but hasn't yet found the complete answer, only some clues as to another direction.
It is a pity there are not more illustrations.