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The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-first Century, by Joseph Rykwert
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One of the most highly respected architectural historians of our time takes on the question of whether or not we have the cities we need and what we can do to create them.
To understand why people love or hate their cities and why cities succeed or fail their inhabitants, Joseph Rykwert examines a broad spectrum of urban centers. Among them are Mexico City, the world's largest metropolis, sprawled around its old center; Berlin, newly reunited and furiously rebuilding; New Delhi and Islamabad, new capitals that exist alongside older towns; grandly planned cities like Chandigarh, Canberra, and Brasília; and more modest new towns like Columbia, Maryland, and Celebration, Florida, built in an attempt to correct the problems endemic to big cities.
Rykwert looks at image, style, and ornament; at public space and buildings; at infrastructure and street layout; at the visual qualities of contrast, strife, and energy that contribute to a city's appeal. Discussing both successes and failures, he suggests ways in which we can retain--or return to--the sense of place and individuation that determines the nourishing character and soul of the urban landscape.
- Sales Rank: #2404259 in Books
- Published on: 2000-09-19
- Released on: 2000-09-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.03" h x 6.28" w x 9.68" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 283 pages
Amazon.com 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 centers 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 postwar 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 globalization 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
From Publishers Weekly
The city is at the center of the modern world: whether we live in one or not, they affect our lives through commerce, culture and civitas. In this complexly argued, beautifully written and provocative meditation on the nature of cities, Rykerk (The Idea of a Town) investigates the intricate relationships between the individual and the urban. By examining the historical development of citiesAfrom the invention of the water lock in mid-15th-century Italy that helped facilitate water transport, to the founding of U.S. utopian communities, such as New Harmony in the early 18th century, to the expansion of Manhattan into a grid of streets in the mid-19th centuryAhe explores how cities grew to meet human needs, analyzing which needs remain unfulfilled. In full command of a wide range of knowledge, Rykwerk blithely moves from a discussion of how the aesthetics of John Ruskin and William Morris dovetailed with the political theories of Engles to how changes in tourism affected urban planning and development. These large themes match the "grandiloquence" of those great cities and the role they played in the development of the last three centuries. At the book's end, Rykwerk discusses how contemporary cities can be made more congenial, drawing upon examples such as the role of the car in modern China, the urban theories and activist agenda of Jane Jacobs and the place of museums in the urbanscape. Rykwerk uses nuance, practicality and foresight to show how, through "little plans" composed of "sobriety and effective actions," cities can be useful and wholesome to those who inhabit them. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Urban planning holds a natural fascination for most people. Children gather around a game board of Monopoly, adults log onto the computer for Sim-City, and we all play out our fantasies of finally getting it right. Rykwert, an architect, professor, and author of numerous books, notably The Idea of a Town (1988), provides a broad historical picture of the diverse factors that have shaped our cities. He touches on advances in technology and science, the development of artistic and architectural styles, and the quest of social reformers and philosophers to form perfect utopias as well as combat the undesirable by-products of cities, like traffic and pollution. Rykwert's fast-moving narrative, conversational in style, spans biblical times to modern Bilbao, but he focuses special attention on two periods that saw huge waves of dispossessed rural populations: the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries and the mid-twentieth century. Too vast in scope for serious research purposes, Rykwert's survey is nonetheless a well informed, accessible, and very interesting introduction to the field. James Klise
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A ground level view from a city lover
By Amazon Customer
What's Joseph Rykwert's perspective and what's his view of the city? It's not very easy to peg down. It's not that of "sociologists, traffic experts, and politicians" as he says that he's "always been struck at how little the physical fabric of the city - its touch and smell as well as its sights - occupies their attention". Maybe he's more inclined to take an economists view and see things as Jane Jacobs does. Then again maybe not. Rykwert says quite plainly that cities do not develop "naturally". The perspective is definitely not that of a speeding, disinterested motorist. Rykwert refers to the impact of cars as "catastrophic" and says "I am not, nor have I ever been a driver." Now we're getting somewhere - a supporter of New Urbanism? Not quite. He has this to say about one of those showpiece communities: "the whole business of 'community' at Celebration is about...real estate". Rykwert is equally critical of a few architects (modernists), certain building designs (government and institutional), a couple of city plans (Brasilia and New Delhi), and some approaches to urbanism (the New Town concept of post WWII Europe).
With all that's wrong it's amazing that this book didn't turn out to be a miserable reading experience. That's partly due to Rykwert's writing skill but moreso because of his very obvious love for the city. THE SEDUCTION OF PLACE and affection for city space is obvious. The depths of his thinking about the urban form is manifest and Rykwert offers a synopsis of what's wrong and also what's to love about a city. "My polemic is not against the disordered, even chaotic city but against the anonymous and alienating one." With this we finally understand what his perspective is. It's that of a person open to experiencing the personality of a city; that of someone at ground level. Our difficulty with coming up with a clear view of the city might be due to the fact that we haven't experienced the city as Rykwert has and it doesn't yet occupy the same space in our hearts and minds. He invites us to begin. "The very condition of openess is what makes our city of conflicts so attractive to its growing crowd of inhabitants. The lack of any coherent, explicit, image may therefore, in our circumstances, be a positive virtue, not a fault at all, or even a problem."
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
What About the Cities We Desire?
By A Customer
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.
What About the Cities We Desire?
By A Customer
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.
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