Dream Cities
Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Dream Cities is a lively, unique and accessible cultural history of modern cities which allows us to view them through the planning, design, architects and movements that inspired and built them. It explores our urban areas in a new way ñ as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy and think ñ and tells the stories of the people who imagined the cities that became the blueprints for the world we live in.??Starting in the nineteenth century and continuing to today, what began as visionary concepts ñ sometimes utopian, sometimes outlandish, always controversial ñ were gradually adopted and constructed on a massive scale in cities around the world, from Dubai to Ulan Bator, London to Los Angeles. Our leafy suburbs, city skyscraper districts, infotainment-driven shopping malls and ësustainableí eco-developments are seen here as never before, from the fantasy villages of Bertram Goodhue to the superblocks of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wrightís Broadacre City.??In this elegantly designed and illustrated book, Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant, obsessed and sometimes megalomaniacal designers, revealing the foundations of todayís varied urban environment. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This survey of prominent architectural trends through the 19th and 20th centuries serves as a concise historical primer of mainly American urban development, though it fails to live up to some of the promises Graham makes early on (American Eden); he is a versatile writer whose enthusiasm can't quite tie the book together. When Graham writes that "architectures are expressions of the desires of their designers and builders: these forms intend to shape people and thus shape the world," he sets up a goal that may be too lofty to meet through the history of different styles and their leading architectural proponents. Graham's precise encapsulations of architects' biographies and philosophies hit the relevant highlights with a lively, accessible style; he deftly captures Bertram Goodhue, a prominent borrower of neoclassical styles whose ideas informed the Art Deco movement, and the rural utopianism of Frank Lloyd Wright's vision. The author is less convincing when he argues for the lasting impact of the New Urbanism approach or the Japanese-influenced Metabolism movement, among other innovations, in brief sections that fail to go beyond mentions of the most representative buildings. An exception is his examination of the influence of the shopping mall and how Victor Gruen's take on shopping centers was first adapted cheaply, then transformed by James Rouse to create highly successful "festival marketplaces" such as San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square and Boston's Faneuil Hall. His assertion that a place has "the ability to trigger aesthetic emotion" and "can reinvigorate cities" reaches beyond biography and addresses the wider effects of architectural change. 59 b&w photos.
