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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not optional reading, September 2, 2001
This review is from: The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and The Ancient World (Paperback)
This is a book more for architects than it is for classicists although it will enrich anyone who reads it. Rykwert is a scholar of the first rank, and it is the mark of a superior scholar to write in such a way as to cull the most arcane information from another field and trim, dry, boil, knead and package it for easy swallowing without sacrificing any of the wisdon-enhancing ingredients. Other books dealing with the same theme have preceded Rykwert's own book. F.W Jackson Knight's <Vergil: Epic and Anthropology> and Fustel de Coulanges' <The Ancient City> are exemplary for their intensity of imagination and obliquity of perspective. And like its predecessors, Rykwert's book takes you on a brief, but a grand tour of the ancient world. That is to say, it shows you just what was so grand about the ancient world and the ancient mind's response to the cosmos in its orientation with regard to "worlding". The book deals with the ancient practice, especially Roman, of founding a city. Rykwert shows you in plain language the profundity and density of religious and mythopoetic factors that used to go into the act of founding a city. But, this book is not about something that once was. It is about that which always IS in Architecture. The Roman poet Sallust said of myths, "these things never happened, but are always." This is what Rykwert gets at in describing the actual mechanisms and the machines that appear as gods, herms, gates, etc, in ancient Mediterranean constructions of the world. World: Mundus, in Latin. The chthonic gateway to the underworld, the big gaping vaginal hole in the middle of the site where the town is to be erected. The final chapter discusses the symbolic parallels found in other traditions. This book is not optional reading for those who would pretend to practice architecture, or for those who want to understand the origin/destiny of the relationship between "art" and "religion", between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Western culture. I recommend Camille Paglia's <Sexual Personae> for a richer and wider and literary understanding of the implication of Rykwert's thesis as it applies to the whole cultural trajectory of the Occident's history. By the way, the sales rank of this book, and that after 25 years, no architect (practitioner, student, consumer) has bothered to write a review of this indispensible work only further fan my misgivings concerning the two thing I know about my own profession: intellectual vapidity of the license wielding practitioners and the miasmic cabalism of the academics.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
overlooked topic offering unexpected insights, January 6, 2004
This review is from: The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and The Ancient World (Paperback)
Rykwert succeeds magnificently with this work, an older and more historically focused effort than his brilliant The Seduction of Place: The Future and Future of Cities. The writing is clear and accessible, but reaches far into historical annals, educating the reader and, more importantly, touching on the role that societies have played in the founding, structuring and continued sanctifying of cities. His focus is Roman, buttressed with Etruscan and Greek insights drawn from lore and archeology, but he also offers a broader panorama in his closing chapters. Rykwert writes with an erudition that seems boundless. Urbanists, archeologists, village-people and philosophers alike will appreciate his thought on a subject that ought not to be overlooked in our mad commuting and hectic urbanism.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Stimulating and Original, April 15, 2011
This book must rank as one of the most important works on ancient cities to have been published in the last fifty or so years. Rather than accept the archaeologists' viewpoint of the ancient city, as a product of a series of practical settlement needs, this book broke new ground when first published in understanding the ancient town as a product of sacred and symbolic rituals. The foundation of ancient towns is understood here as more like a dream than a rational process. In founding their towns, the ancients' are seen to have looked to the heavens and to have addressed the fundamental need to make a `place' in a hostile world. But of course Rykwert's stimulating book is also much more than this, in that it critiques our own somewhat poverty-stricken attempts to make cities from scratch in a meaningful way. The book serves as a timeless reminder of why we choose to live together, that is, in sharing our life-experiences and making sense of the world around us.
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