 Trade In this Item for up to £2.10
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Twenty Minutes in Manhattan for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £2.10, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'In his delightful book, Michael Sorkin writes about New York from a flaneur's perspective. Focusing on a 20-minute walk from his apartment to his studio, the author one of architecture s most consistent and consistently interesting critical voices meanders through architecture, urbanism, sociology, politics and history . . . Quirky, erudite and occasionally frustrating in its movement between the personal, the political and the physical, every city should have its Michael Sorkin.' --Financial Times
'I am glad Sorkin doesn't take the subway: this is the most brilliant epitome of Manhattan ever written.' --Mike Davis
'Not since the great Jane Jacobs has there been a book this good about the day-to-day life of New York. Sorkin writes like an American Montaigne, riffing freely off his personal experience (sometimes happy, sometimes frustrating) to arrive at general insights about New York and about cities everywhere.' --Robert Campbell, architecture critic for the Boston Globe
'I am glad Sorkin doesn't take the subway: this is the most brilliant epitome of Manhattan ever written.' --Mike Davis
'Not since the great Jane Jacobs has there been a book this good about the day-to-day life of New York. Sorkin writes like an American Montaigne, riffing freely off his personal experience (sometimes happy, sometimes frustrating) to arrive at general insights about New York and about cities everywhere.' --Robert Campbell, architecture critic for the Boston Globe
Product Description
Over the course of more than fifteen years, architect and critic Michael Sorkin has taken an almost daily walk from his apartment near Washington Square in New York's Greenwich Village to his architectural studio further downtown in Tribeca. This walk has afforded abundant opportunities for Sorkin to reflect on the ongoing transformation of the neighbourhoods through which he passes; inspired by events both mundane and monumental, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan unearths a network of relationships between the physical and the social city. Sorkin takes the reader on a journey past local characters, neighbourhood stores, buildings, streets and blocks, which he describes with wry humour and self-awareness, as well as a consideration of other points of view. Yet his perambulations are more than a general reflection on what he sees every day: they also offer a technique for engaging a wide range of issues that preoccupy him as an architect, urbanist and citizen. Whether Sorkin is despairing at street garbage, or celebrating elevator etiquette, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan offers a testing ground for speculation about the way in which the city can be newly imagined and designed, to deal with pressing issues such as the crisis of the environment, free expression and public space, security and surveillance, the place of history, and the future of the 'neighbourhood'. Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, growing out of an intimate relationship with a much-loved locality, ultimately offers a grounded set of ideas that are relevant not only to the preservation and amelioration of New York, but also to cities everywhere.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
an incredible self-indulgent, pious; and data free waffle about the city from a professor who it seems is more like a tourist in the city; .. my awful landord etc etc ; and then tries to cover his pesudo left views by referring to 'gentrification' .. nothing new .. nothing really challenging ... but i am sure he is warming himself in the warm glow of self-conratulation
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Walk Man
9 Oct 2009
Format:Hardcover
Michael Sorkin has written the best book on architecture and cities I have read in thirty years.
The groaning tables of books on architecture and its vulgar opposite, real estate, have been near collapse from useless piles of theories, career promotions, trashing old houses, freezing relics, flipping toxic properties, making tidy fortunes by deceiving yearning home buyers, and most of all boosting the pathetic dreams of new urbanists out to out-do Disneyesque fantasists.
Sorkin shows that cities are far better than they have been made out to be by defilers of the landscape who want to ruin them in order to sell new, improved cleansing soapsuds.
By walking daily from his home to studio along a small chunk of lower Manhattan, historicized Greenwich Village to tonified Tribeca, Sorkin has gestated thousands of eye-widening insights about what works in cities and what doesn't.
He gives little credit to aggressive professional planners in thrall to rich developers, instead he bestows awards on street entrepreneurs and neighborhood believers. He wonderfully and informatively describes details of large failures and small successes in New York City, the United States, Europe, Asia and elsewhere he has traveled to lecture and study -- many sure to start as headshaking before erupting as in belly-laughs.
Incivil discourse -- urban warfare -- gets special attention, the worst and the best, the enduring homicidal threat of infernal vehicles against pedestrians fighting for their lives. The cellphone yakkers, the widebody baby strollers, the second-hand smokers, the Formula 1 jerks in from Jersey, the national security bollards, the the homeland security aggressors, the corporate haters of trees, the venal, cruel, landlords at home and work, the fancy architects without scruple, what else have you always wanted somebody to challenge, ridicule and perfectly plan for extinction.
Sorkin handily provides tips for winning exclusive use of an elevator, what to enjoy in cities no tour guide knows, who to be forever angry at for damaging our habitats, what each of us can do to contribute to -- demand of our elected representatives, designers and educators -- places to live and thrive under our own guidance, free of orchestrated interference by exploiters of cities and their covert lobbyists and financiers.
Get this heart-warming, mind-stretching book, take a hike with Sorkin, dodge insane traffic, dump garbage in front of your landlord's office, pray for rent control to spread around the world.
The groaning tables of books on architecture and its vulgar opposite, real estate, have been near collapse from useless piles of theories, career promotions, trashing old houses, freezing relics, flipping toxic properties, making tidy fortunes by deceiving yearning home buyers, and most of all boosting the pathetic dreams of new urbanists out to out-do Disneyesque fantasists.
Sorkin shows that cities are far better than they have been made out to be by defilers of the landscape who want to ruin them in order to sell new, improved cleansing soapsuds.
By walking daily from his home to studio along a small chunk of lower Manhattan, historicized Greenwich Village to tonified Tribeca, Sorkin has gestated thousands of eye-widening insights about what works in cities and what doesn't.
He gives little credit to aggressive professional planners in thrall to rich developers, instead he bestows awards on street entrepreneurs and neighborhood believers. He wonderfully and informatively describes details of large failures and small successes in New York City, the United States, Europe, Asia and elsewhere he has traveled to lecture and study -- many sure to start as headshaking before erupting as in belly-laughs.
Incivil discourse -- urban warfare -- gets special attention, the worst and the best, the enduring homicidal threat of infernal vehicles against pedestrians fighting for their lives. The cellphone yakkers, the widebody baby strollers, the second-hand smokers, the Formula 1 jerks in from Jersey, the national security bollards, the the homeland security aggressors, the corporate haters of trees, the venal, cruel, landlords at home and work, the fancy architects without scruple, what else have you always wanted somebody to challenge, ridicule and perfectly plan for extinction.
Sorkin handily provides tips for winning exclusive use of an elevator, what to enjoy in cities no tour guide knows, who to be forever angry at for damaging our habitats, what each of us can do to contribute to -- demand of our elected representatives, designers and educators -- places to live and thrive under our own guidance, free of orchestrated interference by exploiters of cities and their covert lobbyists and financiers.
Get this heart-warming, mind-stretching book, take a hike with Sorkin, dodge insane traffic, dump garbage in front of your landlord's office, pray for rent control to spread around the world.
Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
18 Mar 2012
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I'm an Australian who loves New York. This book took me through a series of architectural journeys not only around the precinct in which the author lives and works but with excursions into many other areas around the world. This provided a broad context as well as the detail. I also loved that he knew and admired Jane Jacobs.
Having excellent maps of New York and having walked much of this precinct, I was able to follow him in great detail. All in all, a very enjoyable book for one of my predelictions about both architecture and New York.
Having excellent maps of New York and having walked much of this precinct, I was able to follow him in great detail. All in all, a very enjoyable book for one of my predelictions about both architecture and New York.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
1 Feb 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is a must for anyone interested in the architecture and social fabric of life in New York. My son and I found it fascinating and although a bit dry n places - well worth the time. Can be read in small chunks as time allows.Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
