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"It is refreshing to look at standard themes of the history of urban design from a nonrational point of view, to see surveyors as quasi-priests and orthogonal planning as a sophisticated technique touched by divine mystery... Rykwert's lasting worth will be to wrench us away from rationalist simplicities, and to make us face the fundamental disquiet of the human spirit in its claim to a permanent place on the land."- Spiro Kostof, "Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians" (review of the second edition)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Roman towns and their history are generally regarded as being the preserve of the archaeologist or the economic historian. In this famous, unusual and radical book which touches on such disparate themes as psychology and urban architecture, Joseph Rykwert has considered them as works of art. His starting point is the mythical, historical and ritual texts in which their foundation is recounted rather than the excavated remains, such texts having parallels not merely in ancient Greece but also further afield Mesopotamia, India and China.
To achieve his reading of the Roman town, he has invoked the comparative method of the anthropologists, and he examines first of all the 'Etruscan rite', a group of ceremonies by which all, or practically all, Roman towns were founded. The basic institutions of the town, its walls and gates, its central shrines and its forum are all of them part of a pattern to which the rituals and the myths that accompanied them provide clues. Like in other 'closed' societies, these rituals and myths served to create a secure home for the citizen of Rome and to make him feel part of his city and place it firmly in a knowable universe.
'It is refreshing to look at standard themes of the history of urban design from a nonrational point of view, to see surveyors as quasi priests and orthogonal planning as a sophisticated technique touched by divine mystery . . .. Rykwert's lasting worth will be to wrench us away from rationalist simplicities, and to make us face the fundamental disquietof the human spirit in its claim to a permanent place on the land.' Spiro Kostoff, Journal of the Society Architectural Historians
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
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.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
10 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Not optional reading
2 Sep 2001
Format: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.
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Stimulating and Original
15 April 2011
Format:Paperback
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.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
overlooked topic offering unexpected insights
6 Jan 2004
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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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