No comments about Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898--1938.

1 comments about Landscape: Patterns, Perception and Process.

1. I bought this book for a class about two years ago, it was a not required, but my professor suggested it in addition to our required text. After the semester ended, the course was reformatted, and this book was not being bought back. This book sat on the shelf with others I've kept, decided to buy, or also have been left with until about November.
   
   I really wish we had used the book, I wish that I had read it earlier because some of the design principles raised by Bell have dramatically helped to improve my work. I haven't finished the book yet, but it has helped me greatly to understand my own designs to explain them to others, as well as to form a starting point with the idea that humans have certain native proportions, angles, shapes, colors, and patterns that are perceived as beautiful. These concepts are necessary when you are involved in landscape architecture, and I'm very glad I ended up using this book.

1 comments about Fluid City: Transforming Melbourne's Urban Waterfront.

1. It was recommended by a professor, and I learned a lot from it.

No comments about Architecture and Participation.

1 comments about America's Original GI Town: Park Forest, Illinois (Creating the North American Landscape).

1. This is a planner's history of this unique American village, located about thirty miles South of Chicago. Gregory Randall has the advantage of growing up in Park Forest, which gives him some insight into the community that an outside observer might miss. He also has the training and experience as an urban planner to understand and appreciate the complexities of creating a new town.

   Randall places Park Forest in the contex of planned communities in England and the United States. His discussion of Riverside, Illinois, is good; but he ignores Pullman, Illinois, and Marktown, Indiana, as earlier planned communities in the Chicago area. His treatment of Harvey, Illinois, includes the minor error of listing the Chicago lumberman, Turlington W. Harvey, as an evangelist, although he was associated with the evangelist, Dwight Moody.

   He also does not deal with the demogragrahic changes that been pronounced on the South Side of Chicago and the South Suburbs. This racial and ethic movement has affected the developments that the planners did not anticipate. Perhaps, this is beyond the scope Randall's book, and deserves a monograph of its own.

   As a resident of Park Forest for twenty-six years I learned much about the origins and development of my town. I was especially interested in the how the lack of cooperation from the Illinois Central Railroad, forced the planners to drop their first chice for the location of the Park Forest Plaza. Thus, many of Park Forest's problems with a declining downtown area can be understood. I recommend this book to all who have an interest in the post-World War II period, and especially to all those who live Chicago area.

1 comments about Sustainable Urban Development Volume 1: The Protocols and Environmental Assessment Methods (Sustainable Urban Development).

1. Gosh, there's a clever acronym offered by the book - BEQUEST = Building, Environmental QUality Evaluation for SusTainability. It is explained as offering a reworking of urban areas. So that a distinctive urban culture might emerge, in a spatially compact form. Accompanied by heavy use of energy efficient public transport. Explained in this way, it is certainly desirable in many European cities. Or American ones, for that matter.
   
   Building design is meant to enable most of these properties. So that a building would take full advantage of natural daylighting and ventilation, and have super-insulation. Reducing the overall energy needs of its occupants. Plus, simply making taller buildings helps increase the compactness of the overall city, and the efficiency of roads and public transport.

No comments about Capitalism's Eye: Cultural Spaces of the Commodity (Cultural Spaces).

No comments about Signs, Symbols and Architecture.

1 comments about Squares: A Public Place Design Guide for Urbanists.

1. Mark Childs really knows how to write about Civic Spaces. Highly recommend this book.

No comments about The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility.