The following are a few good books, relating to some combination of architecture, planning, urbanism, and identity, to help keep you warm this fall and winter. (Earlier: 1, 2)
The Public Chance: New Urban Landscapes, by Aurora Fernandez Per and Javier Arpa.
The Public Chance, a new publication of A+T, is a remarkable collection of 30 public realm design projects from around the globe, culled from A+T's "In Common" series. Encompassing projects on formerly derelict industrial sites; in leftover peripheral areas; in and among a city's infrastructure; and along waterfront zones, the detailed and visually arresting book merits a prominent spot on your bookshelf. All of A+T's works are gorgeous; this one is no different.
The book does a great job of drawing out the uniqueness of each project while simultaneously drawing parallels between them, making a useful and inspiring catalog of successful strategies for intervention, that any urban designer would appreciate having handy. (Sample pages, below.)
The National Park Architecture Sourcebook, by Henry Kaiser.
The National Park Architecture Sourcebook is a fascinating and exhaustive 600-page survey of many built components of the American national park system, encompassing well-known national park lodges, to historic structures both big and small, to a wide variety of national monuments.
Invaluable for the traveler, the book is organized logically by region and state, and each entry includes photos, a web link, and abundant information about each specific site's history and architectural details. For the armchair traveler, the book's contents are also interesting for the composite story they tell about national identity as well as the vicissitudes of national historic preservation efforts. Furthermore, they leave the reader in awe of the breadth of properties the National Park Service maintains. Kaiser's impressive creation has certainly sparked my wanderlust, and will likely do the same for you.
Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination, by Lance Berelowitz.
Repeat visitors to this website probably perceive the fascination I have with Vancouver--its benign climate and dramatic setting cradling a forest of thin, glass towers, housing a cosmopolitan, progressive community of a couple million of the luckiest people anywhere. In fact, I featured a Douglas Coupland book about the city here before. Berelowitz's Dream City is another "urban decoder ring" that explores how the city's stand-alone combination of planning, architecture, geography, environment, history, and politics combine to form a place apart.
Reading Dream City reinforces the fact that I am not alone in my Vancouver views. Berelowitz, an urban planner who works in the city, and who authored the bid book that won the city the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics, points out in his introduction that the book is not meant as an exhaustive history of Vancouver's history and emergence as a world city, but rather, the record of his search for its sense of place, all of its Edenic features playing active roles on the city's ever-changing stage:
There is something exhilirating about living in a city on the ascendance, a city that is getting demonstrably better by the year. Not too many cities can make this claim. Every morning, Vancouver wakes up to something new, yet another project underway or a shift in the way it permits itself to be governed. New construction rises up from the ground at a frenetic pace, in a parody of the rate of natural growth in the Pacific Northwest rain forest. Buildings are also demolished, in most cases instantly forgettable ones. The pace of change is breathtaking.
And there is something really exciting reading about a city in such constant flux.
Branding New York: How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World, by Miriam Greenberg.
Branding New York transports the reader to mid-1970s New York City, offering immersion in the financial, social, and cultural malaise that enveloped the near-bankrupt city at that time, and providing the backdrop that led to the creation of the "I (heart) NY" logo, one of the earliest and most widely recognized city branding campaigns ever created.
Greenberg, assistant professor of sociology at UC-Santa Cruz, examines how the creation of the city's brand manifested an effort by political interests to combat the negative publicity the city had received, and the sanitizing aspirations behind its creation. It also looks at the fallout (!) from the campaign and the resulting effects this expression of "love" has had on the city of New York, as well as the precedent the campaign set for how cities continue trying to repackage themselves.
Perhaps especially relevant right now, as the global economy plunges and social and urban issues come to the fore nationally, Branding New York is a fascinating glimpse into the very different world of the relatively recent past.
AA Gill Is Away, by AA Gill.
If only more planners and designers read travel writing, and particularly AA Gill. To overlook travel writing--its chronicling of a sense of place (and by extension, the consumption of an experience)--as a source of inspiration would deny the pleasures of books such as this one. Of course, in reading any travel narrative, there is the element of living vicariously through the experience of others; but it is in the forthright detail that good travel writing provides that teaches readers how to observe a place with fresh eyes. This book covers Gill's journeys to 21 very different places.
Gill, current entertainment and food critic for the Sunday Times, traces his beginnings as a travel journalist by telling his editor that what he wanted to "interview places," not really knowing what he meant. After being sent to Prague on this premise, struggling with his assignment, he stumbles on a realization:
Paul Klee wrote that the art of drawing was the art of omission and I realized that in interviewing a place, what you left out was as crucial as what you put in. Here I'd been fretting over finding a story and had been inundated with them. Every city is an anthology of stories. They fade in and out of each other. Stop and start. Places are an endless index of beginnings. Prague didn't work because I couldn't edit out what wasn't essential. I had too much to say and too little space. But I loved the place....This experience was quite unlike being a tourist, it had been intense in the way it made me look and listen and I can still recall the smells, the particular quality of the light, the warmth of the heated tram seats and the fake fur collars of the fake blond girls. I really wanted to do it again.
With his work he takes the half-baked nature of so much travel writing to task:
Travel writing is also part of the illusion of global familiarity, the constant stream of images from over there that flood through the media combined with air travel, telephones, faxes, the Web and globalization, all giving us the impression that the world has shrunk to a homogenous place, not so much a village as a sprawling suburb. But the more I travel, the less it seems familiar...Electric familiarity has given us the illusion of understanding. You think you know us, we think we've got your number.
Dividing the world into four sections with London at the center--South, East, West, and North--Gill writes candidly and with brutal wit about places as disparate as Sudan and the San Fernando Valley. Engaging and funny, it seems natural that anyone involved in the physical or cultural construction of place would benefit from reading this book, with its unusual and powerful voice.
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