Customer Reviews

Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City

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I enjoyed reading this book because it was very thought provoking and especially was fun to read. Not too academic, but not dumbed down either.

Placing words continues the author's thesis on no such thing as death of distance. This is a good news for all space loving, teleworking, and distant cousins, in the global village.

Another good thing is, in addition to many stories and histories, this book offers a glimpse of application of data mining technique in the area of architecture and spatial design (62-64).

The weakness of the book (if this book has to be a good reading for the non-architects), is the absence of any explanation on what the title and the sub-title are supposed to be. For instance, symbols, as used in this book, relate to graphic and computer icons, rather than symbols or signs in place, space and visual domains (as in religious, secular, or others).

Further, as seen in the acknowledgements (p. 213), this book also includes auhtor's already published works, and hence it is not much of the current (the worldview as-is) and real-time (synchronous) information visualization.

(Planeta Journal) - Subtitled "Symbols, Space and the City" this book is the work of a MIT Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and author of the superb e-topia. Among the topics this book addresses is the necessity of flashy downtown office towers in an age of corporate Web sites. Clever, funny and insightful, this book is highly recommended reading.