Buy this book with Edge City: Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau today!

Buy Together Today: $41.71

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs  (62)  $10.85

Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century by James Howard Kunstler  (27)  $10.20

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany  (82)  $12.73

Repairing the American Metropolis: Common Place Revisited (Samuel and Althea Stroum Books) by Doug Kelbaugh  (1)  $50.00

Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise And Fall Of Suburbia by Robert Fishman  (1)  $19.50

› Explore similar items : Books (13)

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Description

"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.

See all Editorial Reviews

First Sentence:
In the evolutionary history of humans, the period of modernist town planning and the technologies that support it are not even a blip on the chart. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
globalizing modernity, town fabric, architectural academy, campus architect, sun diagram, black plans, city fabric, new urbanism, orange shapes, planning code, architectural world Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
San Francisco, World War, Colin Rowe, New York, United States, Catherine Bauer, Los Angeles, Collage City, Addison Circle, Market Street, San Jose, Arthur Brown, City Hall, Grand Inquisitors, Alice Waters, Jane Jacobs, Julia Child, New Deal, South Central, Frank Gehry, Kenneth Frampton, Rem Koolhaas, Loma Prieta, Radiant City, Red Vienna New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

Search Inside This Book: