Preserving the World's Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis [Hardcover]

Anthony Max Tung (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 9, 2001

Both epic and intimate, this is the story of the fight to save the world’s architectural and cultural heritage as it is embodied in the extraordinary buildings and urban spaces of the great cities of Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

Never before have the complexities and dramas of urban preservation been as keenly documented as in Preserving the World’s Great Cities. In researching this important work, Anthony Tung traveled throughout the world to visit remarkable buildings and districts in China, Italy, Greece, the U.S., Japan, and elsewhere. Everywhere he found both the devastating legacy of war, economics, and indifference and the accomplishments of people who have worked and sometimes risked their lives to preserve and renew the most meaningful urban expressions of the human spirit.

From Singapore’s blind rush to become the most modern city of the East to Warsaw’s poignant and heroic effort to resurrect itself from the Nazis’ systematic campaign of physical and cultural obliteration, from New York and Rome to Kyoto and Cairo, we see the city as an expression of the best and worst within us. This is essential reading for fans of Jane Jacobs and Witold Rybczynski and everyone who is concerned about urban preservation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

HThe idea of preserving the material past is not a new one the Emperor Majorian (the Jane Jacobs of 458 C.E. Rome) issued an edict to protect old buildings but in modern times, it has often been in sharp conflict with the contemporary forces of commerce, war and redevelopment. Tung, a former New York City Landmarks Preservation Commissioner, has written an innovative historical and theoretical study of architectural and cultural preservation efforts in 20 cities across the world. Rather then relying on one cultural model, Tung makes his argument by illuminating specific cases in context how Amsterdam's "medieval communal water boards" set the groundwork for modern preservation; how religious warfare devastated and continues to hinder the conservation of Jerusalem; and in China and Japan, how preservation efforts focus on retaining "the original aesthetic" rather than the original building. But the common theme is the importance of cultural conservation. Tung visited each of the 20 sites himself and relies on exhaustive archival research. He presents difficult problems fairly such as whether the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece despite Athenian pollution, the battle over air rights in Manhattan, and whether the reconstruction of Warsaw has destroyed the history of its destruction during the war always attempting to find a solution that relies on common sense, historical integrity and balancing practical needs with preserving heritage. This is an important contribution not only to the literature of urban studies and city planning, but to architectural history and sociology. 75 b&w photos and 50 maps not seen by PW.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Having learned that the most useful information on architectural preservation often comes from other places, former New York City Landmarks Preservation Commissioner Tung decided to visit some of the world's most significant buildings in China, Italy, Greece, Japan, and elsewhere. Here he aims to compile what he learned into one volume, recording his on-site investigations into the architectural preservation issues facing 18 major cities of the world. The first section describes the destruction of historic urban environments worldwide and the conservation statutes that have been created in response. The second two contain a series of urban conservation profiles. While the book is not meant to be an academic treatise, its format and depth of discussion will discourage most popular readers. The maps are useful if minimal given the book's length; 75 black-and-white photographs, though not included in the proof copy, should help clarify the discussions. Recommended for urban public libraries and all architecture and urban planning collections. Jay Schafer, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; First Edition first Printing edition (October 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517701480
• ISBN-13: 978-0517701485
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #989,936 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than just buildings.., January 14, 2002

By 

leora dowling (St. Augustine, Florida USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Preserving the World's Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis (Hardcover)

I picked up this book because I love Venice--no intention of buying it, just browsing, but the introduction inspired me to know and read more. What a treat this book has been! It is not at all pedantic, and encompasses far more than discussions of buildings; it is about history, lifestyles, politics, beauty, and cruelty. The book calls attention to the dire poverty so many people endure, and the deep danger that so many of the world's greatest, most historic and exotic cities face because of lack of money, corrupt politicians, gigantic bureaucracies, uncontrolled population growth, shortsightedness, and the weather. Yet the book is uplifting, too. The most amazing chapter deals with the total destruction of Warsaw during WWII, and the strength and ingenuity the Polish people used to rebuild it. I was surprised and delighted by the depth of Mr. Tung's historical knowledge, his fairness, his compassion, and his prose. A wonderful book in every way.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Seminal Work, December 4, 2001

By 

Leo Kaplan (New York NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Preserving the World's Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis (Hardcover)

This is a remarkably profound and informative work. The author, Anthony Tung, has somehow successfully and exquisitly managed to comprehend the city as a living organism - uniting the social, psychological, and cultural features of the population of the city with its physical, material, and institutional environment. The physical aspect of the city is the externalization of the ethos of its people. In turn it also daily reinforces and recreates that ethos. The city is also one of the major "secondary ties", i.e. substitutes for our "primary tie", our family, that we necessarily create as we move from infancy into the chaos of the external world. As such it is one of our most important communities, and helps to provide us with a sense of identity, meaning, and stability in the face of the meaninglessness and anxiety provoking nature of the world. As the family does, it succors us and protects us. In return we give it our loyalty. As long as this relationship between the city and its people is harmonious, the quality of life ranges from the tolerable to the the exhilirating. But when that organic unity is seriously ruptured, the consequences are devastating. Thus the "preservation" of the city is too serious a matter to be left to chance.

In his scholarly review of the history of the great world cities he takes up here Tung has, together with the orientation noted above, also found exceptionally fruitful Freud's great model, from his Civilization and Its Discontents, that views history, made by human beings, as the dynamic resultant of eros and thanatos, life and death forces, of destructive and preservative impulses. Thus, all in all, he has given us a unique work, indeed a seminal work on the subject, and one which will, and should, set the tone for future scholarship and practice.

Leo Kaplan
(...)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly excellent book on the great cities of the world, November 23, 2004

By 

Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Preserving the World's Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal of the Historic Metropolis (Paperback)

In March of 1995 author Anthony M. Tung journeyed to 22 of the world's greatest cities in order to study how architectural preservation had failed and succeeded in some of the most artistically and historically significant urban areas around the globe. Having served for many years as a member of New York City's Landmarks Preservation Commission, Tung sought to understand how the complex issue of urban conservation was handled around the world and to gather in one book a body of very basic information about this practice.

Until the 20th century, each new stage of architecture and construction referred substantially to previous stages; in Western culture, there was a "direct aesthetic line" connecting the architecture of classical Greece, imperial Rome, the Romanesque period, the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Rocco, and all forms of classical revival that followed, with even divergent traditions like French Gothic or English Tudor making use of common architectonic elements. Cities tended to be harmonious, each new generation of buildings blending with older buildings to a great degree.

In the 20th century however, many age-old aesthetic traditions were abruptly discarded by a modern, new, jarring architecture, built often at vastly different scales than older buildings, of completely different materials, built with new methods, buildings that were consciously designed to have a complete lack of relationship with the previous continuum of form. In Cairo for instance skylines once dominated by domes and minarets of mosques are now ruled by looming massive hotels. Massive gray residential slabs now dominate the remaining parts of historic Moscow. In some cases, as in New York, new buildings were built over and around preserved historic buildings, making them appear toy-like and ridiculous. Further, these buildings of alien scale and design often hopelessly fractured any urban architectural harmony, often forever, as what was destroyed can either never be replaced or only replaced at great financial, legal, political, and economic cost.

Older cities of handcrafted buildings, made of natural materials from the immediate environment of the city, reflecting the historical values and physical characteristics of unique urban cultures Tung wrote now constitute a "finite resource from a closed period of human cultural evolution." Much of the unique architecture of the world's great cities - ancient Roman ruins, the cross-cultural traditions of Singaporean pernanakan architecture, buildings that show a great "specialness of place" - is still in danger in many places of being replaced by a global monoculture, of older unique buildings being replaced by comparatively poorly constructed structures that are generic in design and that differ little in response to local environmental and social surroundings.

Why were older buildings replaced? War certainly plays a factor as might be expected, though by and large Tung feels that city residents themselves are responsible for building replacement. Sometimes older handcrafted buildings are replaced for what were laudable reasons, such as slum clearance, attempts to give the poor a better quality of life, though often irreplaceable but fixable buildings were demolished rather than rehabilitated. Some cities, such as Vienna, Charleston, and Amsterdam (which are detailed at length), bucked this trend, either saving old buildings or constructing new public housing with a conscious effort to maintain local architectural traditions. More often than not though making money was the goal; speculative real estate and construction in the name of progress fractured urban landscapes, as out of scale skyscrapers thrust into the London skyline and ugly hotels of poor artistry were erected in Cairo.

Sometimes destruction or replacement of older handcrafted buildings seemed nearly unavoidable; Kyoto for instance, largely spared bombing in World War II, for centuries a city with buildings comprised of shoji (sliding walls of light wood frames covered by translucent paper) and tatami (rectilinear straw mats of standardized dimensions that covered the floors), were rapidly being replaced post-war by modern Western buildings that could more easily accommodate such innovations as modern plumbing and electricity. Tung related how this "culture of destruction" is being reversed, efforts in this regard aided by uniquely Asian views of preservation (often times ancient buildings are wood and are partially or wholly rebuilt periodically, the emphasis often in China and Japan on preserving the original form not as in Europe or America the original material) and permanence (Japanese buildings were traditionally built to withstand natural disasters and wars by being flexible and if destroyed by being easily rebuilt).

Sometimes architectural preservation - or destruction - was dictated not by war or by progress but by ideology. The Third Reich demolished the landmarks of Warsaw as a punitive action against the Poles, Nazi architects purposely identifying key Warsaw buildings and purposefully destroying them (additionally many were destroyed in actual combat). As an act of defiance, Polish architects risked their lives (and quite a few perished for their efforts) to document this heritage before it was destroyed, hiding plans and documents during the Nazi occupation and then completely rebuilding the city as an act of remembrance.

Tung recounted many successes in his book as well as failures. What are the common denominators in successful preservation? Clearly economic underdevelopment causes decay and destruction of historic assets. In a detailed chapter on Cairo, Tung discussed how the city's massive problems posed by skyrocketing population growth, extensive poverty, and an endemic culture of illegal settlement and corrupt, byzantine bureaucracy have caused residents to perceive conservation as a lesser priority and have created unique environmental challenges to the city's priceless Muslim architecture thanks to air pollution and a rising water table. Citizens of cities have to have in addition to the means of preserving the city a will to do so; while many of the historic districts of New York were listed and are protected thanks to the efforts of the residents of those areas, Venice, despite widespread international support, is decaying as fewer and fewer Venetians actually live in the historic city, not only affecting city politics and budgets as residents of the historic city lose clout to those outside the historic city but by simply not being present to provide such upkeep.