No comments about The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents (October Books).

No comments about Designing for Alzheimer's Disease: Strategies for Creating Better Care Environments (Wiley Series in Healthcare and Senior Living Design).

No comments about hiCat: Research Territories.

No comments about Olympic Cities: Urban Planning, City Agendas and the World's Games, 1896 to the present (Planning, History and the Environment).

1 comments about Designing Greenways: Sustainable Landscapes for Nature and People.

1. For the price, this book is a great overview to designing greenways. I use this as a reference in my studies frequently--I am a student of Landscape Architecture and see this resource as highly valuable.

2 comments about Toward the Livable City (World As Home, The).

1. I bought this book because I have been commuting a sizeable distance every day from a major city (San Francisco) to a more suburban city in the east bay area. Over that time, I have been developing a vested interest in urban planning, mass transportation, and a number of quality-of-life issues.
   
   "Toward the Livable City" is an anthology of a number of short essays coming from a variety of perspectives on urban living. There's even a series of comic strips- Roadkill Bill, which is not only entertaining, but rings with a lot of truth in addressing the issues and problems with commuting by that dominant form of transportation, the automobile.
   
   But I give this book only three stars because several of the stories, while heartfelt, seemed very out of place in a compilation that deals with very concrete, objective subject matter. In particular, Lynda Morgenroth's "Divorcing the City" is a depiction of her struggles and move from the urban Cambridge, MA area to a quieter, outlying suburb that takes an awful lot of words to point out the obvious: that many of us are torn between the stimulus of living in the city and the peace, quiet, and comfort of the suburbs. The main feeling I got out of her story is that she may be one of those borderline hypochondriac, high maintenance, hypersensitive individuals with so much time on their hands that they have nothing better to do than to obsess over their surroundings.
   
   Other stories fare better, though they are only small slices of the totality of urban living: Kristin Brennan's "Food for the City, From the City" and Terrell Dixon's "City Places, Sacred Places", which deal with urban vegetable gardens and the community, and observing nature in an urban setting, respectively.
   
   The real meat of this book-- and by far the more interesting parts of the book-- comes from the more dispassionate essays that deal directly with development and planning issues. In particular, Philip Lopate's "The Empty Harbor" and Judith Martin's "Reinventing a Vibrant Waterfront" can describe any number of the waterfronts of major cities across the country. It was enlightening to find out the historical and logistic reasons why the waterfront areas are often the last to be developed and utilized to their full potential.
   
   James Kunstler's "Cities of the Future in the Long Emergency" is also an eye-opening work and is remarkably prescient about the inherent problems with suburban sprawl and commuting by car. In fact, a number of these stories reflect and predate the current issues we as a country are facing in terms of global warming, energy consumption, and dependence on foreign oil.
   
   It is heartening to realize that it is possible to reconcile urban living with smart growth, minimal per-capita environmental impact, and even emotional and physical health. In fact, these two things often go hand in hand. Word of caution: overall, this book has a definite uber-liberal slant on urban planning and lifestyle issues-- I have to CRINGE every time I hear a liberal, white, urban professional refer to a favorite restaurant, cafe, or bookstore as "funky". But a number of the essays are worth reading for their intelligent insights into the issues that affect our way of life in major cities.



2. My home town is developing an Arkansas River Master Plan in an effort to merge the river and city into some type of livable arrangement that will be both sensitive to the environment and the needs of residents along the river as well as through out the community. Thus, I was most interested in the theme of this book; that being urban planning.
   The book is a series of seventeen essays by a panel of respected contributors that discusses innovative proposals and doable strategies for dealing with such intense urban issues as sustainable growth, traffic management, safe neighborhoods and riverfront redevelopment in a non-technical manner that tends to fill in the gaps between those that study such matters and those that actually live them. For example, in "City Places, Sacred Places," Terrell Dixon urges the reader to consider the notion that an urban nature walk is not an oxymoron and indeed is vital to American cities. The essay titled "The Region, the True City," by Myron Orfield argues the city and suburbs are intertwined and the old fashioned idea of working together is, after all, the best policy. Two essays, "Reinventing A Vibrant Riverfront," by Judith A.Martin and "The Empty Harbor and the Dilemma of Waterfront Development," by Phillip Lopate deal with water development issues in Minneapolis and New York respectively and will be of particular interest to all those remotely interested in planning for any type of River development.
   In addition to the thought provoking essays there is a helpful reading list, a listing of Public Interest Organizations complete with websites and a comprehensive index.
   This is a must have book for anyone interested in the concept of a truly livable city regardless of their level of expertise or involvement. The contributors manage to seriously discuss the possibilities of a livable city without succumbing to the usual tendency of discussing eye-glazing issues like tax policy, arcane zoning matters and other issues traditionally favored by city builders, planners and other professionals. The book will appeal both to the professional and layman alike and will help bring the readr up to speed on the latest proposals, ideas and suggestions to make our cities and yes, even our rivers, a better place to live.

2 comments about American City: Detroit Architecture 1845-2005 (Painted Turtle Book).

1. My only complaint is that these are obviously digital photos. They just can't match the crispness of film.



2. "American City: Detroit Architecture 1845-2005" is an excellent photography book. Not only is it a wonderful "coffee- table" book, but one that depicts the architectural history of Detroit that is now, sadly, being overlooked. Sharoff and Zbaren selected 50 buildings that they fell represent the "best" of Detroit over the past 160 years. Some of the architects represented are Albert Kahn, Isamu Noguchi, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Minoru Yamasaki, Philip Johnson, and many more. It's time to take a "new" look at Detroit.

2 comments about The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments.

1. this is an excellent text. in my opinion indebted to historical analysis. the author gives great examples of cases and interrelations that city building has had during the years. from the neoclasical revival of greece under Othon's kingdom to the work of rossi. very influenced by the work of Benjamin and the "dialectics of seeing" the text is thought provoking, and that is in a critical way of how we experience the urban environment today. However, and again in my opinion, it is within the conclusion that the text fails to provide some answers to its proposed considerations on contemporary technology.



2. The book is heavily indebted to French literary work of the 1960s...and this tends to overload its language in the direction of ponderousness...and a certain detachment from English....polysyllability was made for it...and a curiosity is that it was set up in Cochin and proofread apparently by a tone-deaf spellcheck program...so that 'bear' becomes 'bare,' and 'monastery' is transmuted into 'monestery...etc. It points to the enormous gap between academese and ordinary speech...which is a pity, because the book is nonetheless worth reading...and takes in a broad swathe of thought about the visible aspects of city and the ways in which this is transmuted and thinned-out in modern and post-modern decades. The distinction between 'memory' (i.e. a living tradition of sense and sensibility about space and its demarcations) and 'history' (a dead sense of record and mechanical or miscellaneous assembly) is grounded in the thought of Walter Benjamin...and rooted in the perceptual moralities of John Ruskin and Patrick Geddes. The book would only have been more useful had its polysyllables been (literally) translated into a prose that ebwhite or jamesthurber would have approved.

No comments about Memory and Architecture.

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.