The Seduction of Place

Zusatztext “Rykwert is a gloriously erudite! ingeniously speculative historian and critic of architecture.”–Susan Sontag “[A] wealth of incidental observations and reflections by a mature scholar.”– The Washington Post Book World “[Rykwert] writes elegantly and well! and he knows his subject…. The narrative truly swings along…with great verve and pace.”– The Wall Street Journal “A great historian . . . one of the profession’s treasures and a writer of sobriety and dash.” --Architecture "Far-ranging! idiosyncratic! discursive . . . " The New York Review of Books Informationen zum Autor Joseph Rykwert, author of ten previous books, including The Idea of a Town, is Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Klappentext No other place on earth is as full both of promise and of dread as the city; it is at once alienating and exciting. These concentrations of people have not, however, come about as the result of vast immutable, impersonal forces, but because of human choices. The worsening or betterment of urban life will also be the result of choices. Our choices. That cities display and represent the personal desires of their inhabitants is central to Joseph Rykwert's argument in The Seduction of Place . Insisting that they are the physical constructs of communities, he travels through history to trace their roots in ancient times and outlines current attempts and future possibilities to improve the metropolis. Rykwert includes a broad range of urban landscapes: 18th-and 19th-century Paris and London, the current sprawl of Mexico City and Cairo, planned cities like Brasilia, and, finally, New York, the world capital. Always opinionated and often controversial, Rykwert assesses how and why urban projects from the past succeeded or failed and what lessons can be drawn from them for the future. Ultimately, The Seduction of Place is a deeply felt and powerfully reasoned call for a commitment by every citizen to the creation of a more humane place to live.Chapter 1. How We Got There two huge, successive waves of dispossessed rural populations rose over the cities of the world, flooding the urban fabric and swelling it to breaking point. It was the first of these waves, at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth centuries, that shaped the urban fabric that we know. The recent and much bigger one that billowed up at the half-century has not subsided: we are still floundering in it and cannot yet read its modalities or estimate its impact accurately. It has transformed Cairo and Moscow, Bombay, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, São Paulo-but most of all Mexico. Any account of the response to those two waves must take into account the forces that brought about the first one. I am writing this not because I am a revivalist or historicist, but because the past is all we know. What the shrewd Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter1 wrote fifty years ago or more about economic life is also true of the urban fabric: . . . only detailed historic knowledge can definitively answer most of the questions of individual causation and mechanism. . . . Contemporaneous facts or even historic facts covering the last quarter or half a century are perfectly inadequate. For no phenomenon of an essentially historic nature can be expected to reveal itself unless it is studied over a long interval. The first of these two waves hit British cities first and then French ones, spreading to the rest of Europe-and then the world beyond. What resulted in England and France was very different, though there were many parallels. The French monarchy had for two centuries (but especially in the reign of Louis XIV) managed to concentrate the landed nobility around the court by a system of favor and intrigue so that Paris became a center of political and econ...

Product details

• Authors: Rykwert, Joseph Rykwert
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.03.2002
• EAN: 9780375700446
• ISBN: 978-0-375-70044-6
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 138 mm x 205 mm x 20 mm
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Art