No comments about Fundamentals of Transportation Systems Analysis, Volume 1: Basic Concepts (Transportation Studies).

3 comments about Phoenix in Perspective: Reflections on Developing the Desert.

1. Its hard to take Grady Gammage seriouly in this book. As a real estate lawyer, he has done little else besides acting as state cheerleader for the development industries.

   While providing a pretty good history lesson on the city of Phoenix (thus the one star), this book does little but glorify and exaggerate the contributions the developement industry has had on the growth and prosperity of the Valley of the Sun (he credits the low-cost housing industry on the population boom...oh yeah...and air conditioning).

   He discounts the notions of "sprawl" and blames any negative aspects on Phoenix's growth to market demand and a wonderful climate. He finds a way to absolve the develpment industry from any of the poor planning, tract housing, and characterless suburbs that blanket the Sonoran landscape.

   While agreeing that there will someday be a limit to how large Phoenix and its outlying suburbs can get, he sees little use for any type of growth management and describes growth boundaries as "draconian." Portland is proof enough that growth boundaries do in fact work, and that they are hardly "draconian."

   Gammage's solution to growth issues in Phoenix relates to water supply. Yet he fails to see that dealing with growth management via the water supply is like realizing that its time to go on a diet once you've already reached 400 pounds. By that time its too late. How do you tell a city of 5 million that the water supply has dried up, and now its time to start conserving....or limiting population? If growth boundaries are draconian, how does Gammage describe stopping growth because of a lack of water?

   This book offers a neat history lesson on the Valley of the Sun, but outside of that, it offers little in the form of solutions to Phoenix's problems related to growth, pollution, traffic and its now characterless landscape. I'd give it a half star if I could.




2. This is truly a disappointing and shocking book; and, for that reason, a must read in any city where residents want to stop or at least curtail the destruction of their community by developers whose only motive is greed.

   Grady Gammage Jr. is the son of one of Arizona's great families; Gammage auditorium at Arizona State University, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, honors decades of contributions by his family. Instead of community service, he became a wealthy lawyer for developers and was instrumental in creating the urban blight he so skillfully outlines in this book.

   A hundred years ago, Phoenix was the smallest of the four major Southwestern cities (the others are Tucson, Albuquerque and El Paso). Now it is the largest, and is growing by an acre of new homes per hour. At that rate, as Gammage notes, growth can continue uninterrupted for another 672 years.

   What is the new Phoenix? In Gammage's words, "A small narrow lot, a relatively large house, and a two- or three-car garage combine to produce neighborhoods with a different feel than those of even ten years ago. Houses seem squeezed together by non-existent side yards. Garage doors, lined up to a mandatory setback line, become the dominant feature of the streetscape. Front yards are shallower, with less grass . . . the desert is covered by acres of concrete tile."

   Everything is geared to growth, at the lowest possible cost to developers. When the first Interstate freeway was built through Phoenix in the 1960's, it went below ground in elite neighborhoods and then soared to 25 feet above ground in low income areas. The elevated portion was often called "our Berlin Wall" and it destroyed poorer neighborhoods, providing cheap land for "slum clearance" and industrial space. No interchange was ever built to serve Guadaloupe, a low-income Yaqui village on the freeway; but, when a developer was appointed to the highway commission, bulldozers were at work within six months building an interchange for his speculative subdivision.

   Obviously, as an attorney for developers, Gammage doesn't highlight problems. Yet, two out of three new residents to Arizona leave the state within five years. The Phoenix downtown crime rate is five times the national average. Arizona has the highest percentage of children without adequate medical care of any state, including Texas. It has the second-highest high school dropout rate. Believe it or not, here in the Sonoran Desert, it's against the law to grow sagebrush in your front yard.

   It's what makes this book so worth reading. It's a lesson in every sweet-talkin' word that you'll ever hear from developers and their lawyers. Read it in conjunction with `The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs, often regarded as one of the great urban thinkers of the past 40 years. This book clearly and proudly offers the opposite of everything Jacobs advocates.

   For Phoenix residents, it's a chilling account of change from "the city that Los Angeles wishes it could be" into a mass of urban sprawl that even LA wouldn't tolerate. Gammage does an excellent job; he is articulate, knowledgeable and one of the best lawyers developers can hire. As one of the local asphalt companies proudly says on its billboards, "We really lay it on thick." So does Gammage.

   For outsiders, it explains why two of every three newcomers flee within five years, most within a year. Read it, then decide if you're safe to assume in your city, "It can't happen here."




3. Grady Gammage provides readers with an accurate and insightful account of the development of the Phoenix metropolitan area. More important his book presents a sensible review of the problems of urbanization and suburban growth. Most important it avoids uninformed theories, irrelevant Utopian visions, or public action action that has neither political support nor financial justification.

5 comments about Architecture as a Translation of Music: (Pamphlet Architecture 16).

1. I picked this book up for some fun reading two years ago, and wow! Did I get more than I expected! As an educated individual I knew a lot about the new directions in contemprary music, and I often dreamed of uniting my love for physics and architecture with my musical talents. This book is a fascinating and well designed introduction to the kind of developments in contemporary architectural/musical circles. These projects discussed in PA-16 are some of the first of their kind, and something I am excited to follow up on in my own lifetime. And it's dedicated to John Cage! I reccommend this book to anyone who is at all curious about architecture or contemporary music. It is always refreshing to learn about people who are pushing the boundaries of our imaginations, whatever the topic.

   "New music will be answered by the new architecture- work we have not yet seen --only heard." (John Cage).




2. Read simultaneously Marc Trieb's 'Space Calculated in Seconds' with Liz Martin's PA16. Both books are elegantly written and designed for those willing to delve-in and consider the possibilities.



3. In the begginning i was impressed by the title but disappointed by the quality of its material besides the font is very bad and hard to read , very small sketches hard to see , and the ideas exploration is not accomplished ,so never start with this book for this subject ....



4. For me, this is a thoughtful 80-page booklet touching, with a big broad-brush stroke, on some very intuative and evocative ideas on interdisciplinary work framed around ideas of time and space. To expect a book in the successful Pamphlet Architecture series to be an end all exhaustive study of any given subject is like looking at Time or Granta magazines renowned fiction writings and comparing it to a 500-page Dostoevsky novel - both are equally valid views of the world, but to compare them is like comparing apples to oranges.

   To cover such an intensive topic in a paperback series format with the aim of bringing interest to a subject that is not explored by many in contemporary theory; to have a current look at an age old topic for students to use as a springboard for research; and for over five years to be rated #18 on amazon.com's bestseller list is quite an accomplishment. I encourage all to keep thinking and writing - taking a chance.

   Hats off to the young authors the Pamphlet Architecture series supports!




5. As the title suggests, I was hoping for a book with a thorough symbolic analysis of the connection between architecture (the design of elements in space; or the configuration of space) and music (the design of elements in time; or the configuration of [the experience of] time). Instead, this book offers some mostly affectatious studies on obscure ideas. If your goal is to find a book which presents ideas as of how to explore the architecture+music marriage, I personally would recommend you look elsewhere.

   Some of the projects are intriguing, granted, but perhaps I expected the kind of book which is yet to be written. In any event, this one was not worth the money.

5 comments about Global City Blues.

1. Professional architect Daniel Solomon presents Global City Blues, a passionate and sharply worded warning against the harm that modernist architectural ideals can cause at the expense of city places constructed with the goal of creating community and fellowship. Chapters discuss the importance of style, "Why the City is Not a Work of Art", the massive impact of technology upon architecture, and much more. Written especially for current and aspiring city architects and architectural planners, Global City Blues combines theory with practicality in search of the highest goal - creating places that foster lasting bonds between people, rather than simply serving as flashy showcases.



2. Although Solomon is a New Urbanist, his book is far less nuts-and-bolts than other prominent New Urbanist books such as Duany's Suburban Nation. Instead, Solomon has written a group of short, data-light, footnote-free essays on architecture and urban planning.
   
   Some of the essays were quite educational. I especially liked his efforts to explain the mentality of modernist architects and planners. For example, he points out that even though the Craftsman bungalows that dominated early 20th-century America delivered beautiful public spaces, their kitchens were "dark and segregated." By contrast, 1950s architects sought to make houses lighter and airier, but neglected public space.
   
   Their ideological heirs, the 21st-century "starchitects" tend to be from Los Angeles, a place that "teaches an architect to survive in, even to revel in, a world that is disjointed, irredeemably ugly to many outsiders, and far beyond the normal kind of civic grace that cities have aspired to." And because they are used to ugly streets, they are not so interested in creating buildings that engage with the street or neighborhood around them. By contrast, Solomon is from San Francisco, a place that teaches architects that urbanity still works.
   
   He also speculates that the urban renewal-induced destruction of American cities had a psychological cause: young men who served in World War II had "an absolutely unprecedented and life-forming experience of competence" during their military service, and thus were "ready to build the world anew." But Solomon admits that some of the intellectual ammunition behind postwar sprawl was built earlier: for example, R.G. Tugwell, part of Franklin Roosevelt's "brain trust" suggested something very similar in 1935: "[go] outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community and entice people to go into it. Then go back into the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them."
   
   And Solomon also explains the psychology of New Urbanism, pointing out that New Urbanism, unlike environmentalism, is not motivated primarily by concern over dirty air of global warming, but by the desire to recreate "the quality of experience", to create places where we can connect with the world around us.
   
   An environmentalist's list of necessary attributes of a good place might include hybrid cars or solar power; Solomon's list includes "places to walk", "encounters with others, particularly others who are different", "real air", and "knowledge of what town you're in and where you are in town". Where these elements are missing, people have no reason to go outside, and nothing but a "steady unrelenting diet" of indoor technology (internet, TV, air conditioning, etc.) that makes it difficult for people to distinguish between the virtual world of media experience and the real world of direct experience. (Thus the absurd spectacle of people mourning for dead celebrities such as Princess Diana).
   
   However, some of Solomon's glittering, unsupported generalizations are not so persuasive - for example, his suggestion that Mohammed Atta's hostility towards America was a reaction to "world tourism".



3. I question the premise of the books criticism.
   
   One cannot blame the inadequacies of the modern city on one or two architects (Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe). Those revolutionary architects were purely responding the changing environment that surrounded them; namely the industrial revolution.
   
   To continue to construct buildings and plan communities as they were a thousand years ago would be akin to using wax paper for windows and traveling via horse (as Solomon suggests). Fortunately technology does indeed affect us all and Architects have a responsibility to respond to it accordingly.
   
   I do agree that there are numerous problems with today's cities but turning the clock back to more idealistic times is not the answer, as the self proclaimed "New Urbanists" say.



4. Solomon's book was just the tonic I needed to regain my faith in the real value of the design professions. I had begun to despair that I was the only person who found the Prada posing of Rem Koolhaas and his ilk reminded me ever so much of the children's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." Solomon is apparently another like-minded soul, though his book touches on so much more than the soulless modernism that pervades the design professsion (esp. the academy and the press) today. A committed urbanist, Solomon attempts to show that a very few showoff buildings may have their place in a city, but that a city cannot be made of Frank Gehry monuments. And most especially not of imitation Frank Gehry monuments! He writes with wit, passion, and clarity, three qualities that are often in short supply in tomes by architects. Major kudos to the author, and a strong "buy" recommendation to the reader.



5. This author really states with such power and imagery how screwed up the modern world is. He describes the 'odorless gas of Modernist thinking' that has affected the way we design, plan and build that is anti-human and incredibly destructive to civilized living.
   Great stuff. I couldn't put it down.

No comments about The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators.

No comments about Power: Producing the Contemporary City.

No comments about Along Amsterdam's Waterfront: Exploring the Architecture of the Southern IJ Bank.

No comments about Urban Spaces.

No comments about Rivertown: Rethinking Urban Rivers (Urban and Industrial Environments).

1 comments about The New Waterfront: A Worldwide Urban Success Story.

1. I like this book because it show the poetic and the force on the meet between the land and the water

   For urban designers it show that to work in the situation and context is to work in the most important urban's place because it there is public space