Best of
Urbanism

2003

The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture: City, Technology and Society in the Information Age


Manuel Gausa - 2003
    It contributes to a global vision of the emerging new architectural action that participates in "advanced culture" and visual art disciplines and technology. The book speaks of an architecture inscribed in the information society and influenced by the new technologies, the new economy, environmental concerns and individual interests. The diversity of authors and works is invaluable for the generational intersections in theory discourse. Featuring Manuel Gausa, Vicente Guallart, Willy Muller, Federico Soriano, Jose Morales, Fernando Porras, Inaki Abalos y Juan Herreros, Jose Alfonso Ballesteros, Xavier Costa, Enric Ruiz-Geli, Alejandro Zaera Polo.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews


Hans Ulrich Obrist - 2003
    If "peripatetic" is the word most overused to describe him, it is not inappropriate. The Swiss-born, everywhere-based curator and head of the Programme Migrateurs at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris has an unstoppable wanderlust and a related symptom: his penchant for interviewing anyone and everyone who piques his curiosity, be they artist, scientist, writer, curator, composer, architect, thinker, etc. Since 1993, Obrist has conducted more than 300 interviews, 75 of which are collected here in a selection that respects the cultural and professional diversity of the interviewees. Each interview is introduced by a short text outlining the biography of the interviewee and giving some contextual information on the recording of the interview.

Time-Saver Standards for Urban Design


Donald Watson - 2003
    It provides a single-source for the key reference articles on urban design and physical planning of cities, including social, environmental and economic data.This inaugural volume on the topic of urban design in the Time-Saver Standard series is written for easy reference by urban planners and designers, architects, landscape professionals, environmental engineers, civil and transportation engineers, as well as municipal government and planning officials. This "soon to be a classic" provides a one-volume reference that is indispensable for urban design policy and practice. It is equally valuable for the urban studies educators and students of architecture, urban design and planning.

Public Places-Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design


Matthew Carmona - 2003
    The discussion moves systematically through ideas, theories, research and practice of urban design from a wide range of sources. It gradually builds the concepts one upon the other towards a total view of the subject.

Eugene Atget: Unknown Paris


David Harris - 2003
    With the exception of his earliest photographs, he chose not to represent a particular site by a single, definitive photograph but produced sequences of interrelated images that create a cumulative portrait.A collection of case studies of archetypal urban settings, this book examines Atget’s approach to photography. It features 240 of his photographs—nearly all of which have never been published—assembled to display the integral relationship between the photographer’s working method and his subject matter, revealing the character of Le Vieux Paris itself.A natural companion to the New Press’s Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, Eugène Atget is the product of an exhibit mounted in response to Abbott’s work and reflective of the two photographers’ shared vision.

Tadao Ando: Light and Water


Tadao Andō - 2003
    In 1970 he founded Tadao Ando Architect & Associates; since then the firm has become known for buildings that express a sense of contemplation and meditation in both form and material. Many of his buildings, typically constructed from concrete, define an enclosed space in which visitors can respond to the elements of light and water. Geometrically simple yet subtly and richly articulated, Ando's works share the serenity and clarity of traditional Japanese architecture. This new monograph focuses on the effect of natural elements on architecture, one of Ando's ongoing preoccupations. More than thirty projects are presented, from early houses in Osaka and elsewhere in Japan to major current works, including the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Also included are the Children's Museum, Hyogo, Himeji; the Church on the Water, Hokkaido; the Church of the Light, Osaka; the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum; the Nariwa Museum; the UNESCO meditation space, Paris; the Teatro Armani, Milan; and a private house in Chicago.

Radical Space: Building the House of the People


Margaret Kohn - 2003
    Until recently, however, political theory has overlooked the power of place. In Radical Space, Margaret Kohn puts space at the center of democratic theory. Kohn examines different sites of working-class mobilization in Europe and explains how these sites destabilized the existing patterns of social life, economic activity, and political participation. Her approach suggests new ways to understand the popular public sphere of the early twentieth century.This book imaginatively integrates a range of sources, including critical theory, social history, and spatial analysis. Drawing on the historical record of cooperatives, houses of the people, and chambers of labor, Kohn shows how the built environment shaped people's actions, identities, and political behavior. She illustrates how the symbolic and social dimensions of these places were mobilized as resources for resisting oppressive political relations. The author shows that while many such sites of resistance were destroyed under fascism, they created geographies of popular power that endure to the present.

Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia


Ananya Roy - 2003
    Much of this urban growth is taking place in the cities of the developing world and much of it in informal settlements. This book presents cutting-edge research from various world regions to demonstrate these trends. The contributions reveal that informal housing is no longer the domain of the urban poor; rather it is a significant zone of transactions for the middle-class and even transnational elites. Indeed, the book presents a rich view of "urban informality" as a system of regulations and norms that governs the use of space and makes possible new forms of social and political power. The book is organized as a "transnational" endeavor. It brings together three regional domains of research-the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia-that are rarely in conversation with one another. It also unsettles the hierarchy of development and underdevelopment by looking at some First World processes of informality through a Third World research lens.

Paris, Capital of Modernity


David Harvey - 2003
    The book is heavily illustrated and includes a number drawings, portraits and cartoons by Daumier, one of the greatest political caricaturists of the nineteenth century.

Houston Freeways: A Historical and Visual Journey


Erik Slotboom - 2003
    Houston's freeway journey began. "Houston Freeways" traces the history and influence of the freeway system with extensive photography, fascinating stories, remarkable people, and time capsules to the past."Houston Freeways" is the most comprehensive book ever written about a regional freeway system. A central theme of the book is that Houston, not Los Angeles, is the world's most freeway-influenced city, mainly because of Houston's extensive use of frontage roads on 82% of its freeways. There is no better city for a freeway book. Houston earned the book, and Houston got it! Additional book information: Illustrations: \t526 total215 historical143 modern62 maps and graphics106 photo location maps

Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works


Frank Bryan - 2003
    Bryan examines one of the purest forms of American democracy, the New England town meeting. At these meetings, usually held once a year, all eligible citizens of the town may become legislators; they meet in face-to-face assemblies, debate the issues on the agenda, and vote on them. And although these meetings are natural laboratories for democracy, very few scholars have systematically investigated them.A nationally recognized expert on this topic, Bryan has now done just that. Studying 1,500 town meetings in his home state of Vermont, he and his students recorded a staggering amount of data about them—238,603 acts of participation by 63,140 citizens in 210 different towns. Drawing on this evidence as well as on evocative "witness" accounts—from casual observers to no lesser a light than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Bryan paints a vivid picture of how real democracy works. Among the many fascinating questions he explores: why attendance varies sharply with town size, how citizens resolve conflicts in open forums, and how men and women behave differently in town meetings. In the end, Bryan interprets this brand of local government to find evidence for its considerable staying power as the most authentic and meaningful form of direct democracy.Giving us a rare glimpse into how democracy works in the real world, Bryan presents here an unorthodox and definitive book on this most cherished of American institutions.

Aaron Siskind 100


Aaron Siskind - 2003
    Siskind was not only a critical figure in modern photography, but he also influenced the work of painters of that period, including Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Rauschenberg. "Aaron Siskind 100," the book and exhibition, honors the legacy of this legendary artist through six decades of an incredible photographic journey.

World Cities: 3000 To 2000


George Modelski - 2003
    It also tests the proposition that urbanization is a learning process that, viewed against the backdrop of five millennia, is evidence of world system evolution. The extensive data base it assembles graphically illustrates the extraordidnary leap in urban growth experienced in the 20th century and suggests the imminence of a decisive turning point in world social organization.

Distant Corner: Seattle Architects and the Legacy of H. H. Richardson


Jeffrey Karl Ochsner - 2003
    Disaster soon became opportunity as Seattle's citizens turned their full energies to rebuilding: widening and regrading streets, laying new water pipes and sewer lines, promulgating a new building ordinance requiring construction in the commercial core, and creating a new professional fire department. A remarkable number of buildings, most located in Seattle's present-day Pioneer Square Historic District, were permitted within a few months and constructed within a few years of the Great Seattle Fire. As a result, the post-fire rebuilding of Seattle offers an extraordinarily focused case study of late-nineteenth-century American urban architecture.Seattle's architects seeking design solutions that would meet the new requirements most often found them in the Romanesque Revival mode of the country's most famous architect, Henry Hobson Richardson. In October 1889, Elmer Fisher, Seattle's most prolific post-fire architect, specifically cited the example of H. H. Richardson in describing the city's new buildings. In contrast to Victorian Gothic, Second Empire, and other mid-nineteenth-century architectural styles, Richardson's Romanesque Revival vocabulary of relatively unadorned stone and brick with round-arched openings conveyed strength and stability without elaborate decorative treatment. For Seattle's fire-conscious architects it offered a clear architectural system that could be applied to a variety of building types - including office blocks, warehouses, and hotels - and ensure a safer, progressive, and more visually coherent metropolitan center.Distant Corner examines the brief but powerful influence of H. H. Richardson on the building of America's cities, and his specific influence on the architects charged with rebuilding the post-fire city of Seattle. Chapters on the pre-fire city and its architecture, the technologies and tools available to designers and builders, and the rise of Richardson and his role in defining a new American architecture provide a context for examining the work of the city's architects. Seattle's leading pre- and post-fire architects - William Boone, Elmer Fisher, John Parkinson, Charles Saunders and Edwin Houghton, Willis Ritchie, Emil DeNeuf, Warren Skillings, and Arthur Chamberlin - are profiled. Distant Corner describes the new post-fire commercial core and the emerging network of schools, firehouses, and other public institutions that helped define Seattle's neighborhoods. It closes with the sudden collapse of Seattle's economy in the Panic of 1893 and the ensuing depression that halted the city's building boom, saw the closing of a number of architects' offices, and forever ended the dominance of Romanesque Revival in American architecture.With more than 200 illustrations, detailed endnotes, and an appendix listing the major works of the city's leading architects, Distant Corner offers an analysis of both local and national influences that shaped the architecture of the city in the 1880s and 1890s. It has much to offer those interested in Seattle's early history, the building of the city, and the preservation of its architecture. Because this period of American architecture has received only limited study, it is also of importance for those interested in the influence of Boston-based H. H. Richardson and his contemporaries on American architecture at the end of the nineteenth century.

City: Urbanism and Its End


Douglas W. Rae - 2003
    Douglas Rae depicts the reasons for urban decline, explains why government spending has failed to restore urban vitality, and offers suggestions to enhance city life in the future.“A terrific read, moving seductively from the minutiae of neighborhood history to grand global forces.”—Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone“An extraordinarily detailed study of New Haven, tracing the city’s rise in the early part of the 20th century and its fall in the second half—an almost archetypal tale of the American city.”—Edward Rothstein, New York Times“For anyone with the slightest interest in cities, this book is that rare combination: a must-read volume that you can’t put down.”—Planning Magazine“[Rae] has provided the blueprint for the next generation of thinkers and city dwellers who debate the future of urban America. . . . A tour de force of research.”—Paul Bass, New Haven Advocate