- Hardcover: 252 pages
- Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (9 Nov 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0297819992
- ISBN-13: 978-0297819998
- Product Dimensions: 23.2 x 16 x 3.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 917,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
The subtitle to this, the tenth book by architecture professor (and lively writer) Joseph Rykwert--namely, "The City in the Twenty-First Century and Beyond"--is a whopping misnomer. It is only in the final chapter that Rykwert pays attention (and briskly, even then) to urban developments of recent years and to what we might expect in the 100 years to come. What this book really is, despite what its subtitlers intended, is at once a broad-ranging and satisfyingly detailed social history of some of the great cities of the modern world (mostly the Western one, with a marked emphasis on the two cities Rykwert calls home--New York and London--plus Paris) and an inquiry into how well they have served the material and spiritual lives of the people who inhabit them.
Ranging comfortably and coherently back and forth between the Old World and the New, Rykwert begins with the Industrial Revolution, its factories, the throngs of poor country people that flooded the cities to work in them, and the subsequent 150-year challenge faced by urban centres to house, transport and entertain these throngs cheaply, space-consciously and hygienically. But Seduction of Place is not so much a people's history of the city as it is a vibrantly researched and chronicled play-by-play of the big public--and some private--works of the major metropolises. The book also tackles the luminaries--including Haussmann, Olmstead and Vaux, L'Enfant, and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (who pioneered the enduring school of axial planning at Paris' Ecole Polytechnique)--whose names are often uttered in the same breath as the parks, boulevards and edifices they brought to life.
Social critics like Tocqueville, Marx, Engels, Fourier and Ruskin are just as well represented here, however, ably providing the basis for Rykwert's persistent question of what cities ought to be and how responses to that have diverged and evolved over the years, apart from what they have become, for better or ill, and how they got that way. Even though the book takes a more or less familiar course through the 20th century--from the emergence of subways, skyscrapers, and modernism through post-war urban planning, suburban sprawl, and subsequent urban decay and attempts at renewal--Rykwert knows when to dart away from well-known people, places and things to chronicle the planning of lesser-known English "New Towns" or of distinctly 20th-century cities like New Delhi, Islamabad, Australia's Canberra, and--rather famously--Brasilia, the ultimate "zoned" city.
The final chapter pays the requisite nod to the postmodernist implications of, for example, Celebration, Florida, (Disney's controversial new spin on the "company town") but is really distinguished by Rykwert's startlingly on-the-mark reading of how such wildly popular mega-museums as the new international Guggenheim franchise (with Gehry's Bilbao "branch" currently eclipsing Wright's New York "flagship") have come to best personify the encroachment of corporate globalisation in the urban civic realm. It is a fitting conclusion for a book that manages so gracefully to wed an engrossing history of urban growth with the deeper intellectual, cultural and ethical questions it raises--the very questions that the speculators, preservationists and "ordinary citizens" will still have to answer in creating and sustaining the great cities of the 21st century. --Timothy Murphy
Review
rich in detail, entertaining to read and provocative in its conclusions (Christopher Hirst, Independent )
a superb meditation...and a fascinating narrative (Steven Poole, The Guardian ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
a superb meditation...and a fascinating narrative (Steven Poole, The Guardian ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Most of us live somewhere urban - a contested territory where planners, politicians, architects, speculators and boosters struggle to make their 'vision' prevail.Looking to where cities might go in the future means looking at how they were shaped in the past; and this is what Rykwert does in his elegant, concise and lucid account of 200 years of city history. He explores the interplay between thinking and building. So the theories of Ebenezer Howard, Fourier, Owen, Cerda and le Corbusier are surveyed as are their practical results - the garden city,the survey, the grid,the utopian community and the linear city. Drawing on examples that are the classic urban "collective works of art" - Paris, London, berlin, Vienna and especially New York, the author asserts the need for legible and distinctive urban environments. These don't just come from the plans of visionaries but can be forged through commercial competitiveness - witness the tall office block rivalry between Chicago and New York. Yet economic globalization threatens the local ability to make places distinctive; and Rykwert makes the case for the reassertion of the local , something that even the new-build capitals of the C20th - Chandigarh, Canberra and Brasilia - sought to do. He offers a rebuttal to the charge that cities are somehow visually-domineering dysfunctional aggregates of problems and makes a case for cities as places of seduction and renewal- socially and architecturally the location for experiment,vitality and change. This is a highly-readable Baedeker's guide to architectural history where the breadth of the author's learning is no barrier but an enticement. If you want to know more, and you should,about Modulor and Mies, CIAM and Cerda,metaphoric projection and william Morris then read this book.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
Very knowledgeable author
29 Aug 2008
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Rykwert is extremely knowledgeable regarding architecture and western civilization in general. The book holds my interest in spite of its length and technical slant.
6 of 10 people found the following review helpful
What About the Cities We Desire?
26 Jan 2001
Format:Hardcover
Joseph Rykwert's new book is perhaps his most radical, although he elaborates on themes that have preoccupied him for more than 4 decades. Never has he so emphatically stated his conviction that the cities we desire can become the cities we have, but only if we take hold of our capacity to effect meaningful reform. Rykwert's position is particularly encouraging and insightful at a time when most of us perceive the built environment as the result of abstract and impersonal economic and political forces seemingly beyond any individual influence. Rykwert's stance is a challenge to architect's, urban designers, planners and other citizens who cannot imagine an alternative between revolution and acquiescence other than surrender to conditions as they are. Such inertia is countered by Rykwert, as are rationalist and quantitative approaches to the city, with affirmation of the city as a fundamental setting of and for human will, dreams, and desire. It follows then, according to Rykwert, that any successful making and re-making of cities depends on a set of rational principles that are flexible enough to accomodate chance, elaboration, and improvisation. Features Rykwert believes can become the special qualities of contemporary and future cities (if they are not eradicated). Rykwert's consideration of the city investigates the full-range of attempts to make cities places of and for people; a thread he pursues from ancient cities, to the revolutions of 1848 to the Seattle demonstrations in 1999 in opposition to the World Trade Organization. It is for these reasons, and many others, that Rykwert's book is a must-read for all lovers of cities and perhaps especially for all those who don't yet love them.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Is "Creating Tradition" an Oxymoron?
23 Sep 2006
Format:Paperback
From a lay perspective, "tradition" arises from a repeated series of human acts. In many cases, those acts were first spontaneous or induced by some external event.
Can you "create tradition?"
The most interesting part of this book to me was Rykwert's analysis of Celebration, Florida. This was, of course, Disney's effort to create a brand-new "small town" from the ground up. He correctly diagnoses the effort as being dominated by profitable real estate development. In fairness, he distinguishes Celebration from a typical suburban development because of its dependency on "Olde World" design principles.
What he foresaw, almost inadvertantly, is the more widespread use of this modality for commercial/residential developments now springing up in revived, older suburban areas. These have been commercially successful and have created the sorts of delightful spaces he describes in his coverage of older urban spaces.
It's a good book, albeit a little dogmatic.
Can you "create tradition?"
The most interesting part of this book to me was Rykwert's analysis of Celebration, Florida. This was, of course, Disney's effort to create a brand-new "small town" from the ground up. He correctly diagnoses the effort as being dominated by profitable real estate development. In fairness, he distinguishes Celebration from a typical suburban development because of its dependency on "Olde World" design principles.
What he foresaw, almost inadvertantly, is the more widespread use of this modality for commercial/residential developments now springing up in revived, older suburban areas. These have been commercially successful and have created the sorts of delightful spaces he describes in his coverage of older urban spaces.
It's a good book, albeit a little dogmatic.
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