The Art Of Urbanism

The Art of Urbanism explores how the royal courts of powerful Mesoamerican centers represented their kingdoms in architectural, iconographic, and cosmological terms. Through an investigation of the ecological contexts and environmental opportunities of urban centers, the contributors consider how ancient Mesoamerican cities defined themselves and reflected upon their physicalâe"and metaphysicalâe"place via their built environment. Themes in the volume include the ways in which a kingdomâe(tm)s public monuments were fashioned to reflect geographic space, patron gods, and mythology, and how the Olmec, Maya, Mexica, Zapotecs, and others sought to center their world through architectural monuments and public art. This collection of papers addresses how communities leveraged their environment and built upon their cultural and historical roots as well as the ways that the performance of calendrical rituals and other public events tied individuals and communities to both urban centers and hinterlands. Twenty-three scholars from archaeology, anthropology, art history, and religious studies contribute new data and new perspectives to the understanding of ancient Mesoamericansâe(tm) own view of their spectacular urban and ritual centers.

The book is in three parts.

By adapting Freud's notion of "floating attention" to urban systems, Mario Gandelsonas applies a process of visual drift to the plan of Chicago. He uses mechanical eye of the computer in a "de­layering" process to read the plan of the city and to discover the system of urban notions that are specific to the American grid. Gandelsonas explores the spatial relationships between physical and abstract realities in the Chicago River area, the One-Mile Grid and its subdivisions. By high­lighting the anomalies and idiosyncrasies of the grid the moments where its regularity falters, he establishes a narrative of Chicago's urban text. In separate essays Catherine Ingraham, Joan Copjec, and John Whiteman explore the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and urbanistic dimension of this provocative analysis.

"An accomplished architect and urbanist goes back to the roots of what makes cities attractive and livable, demonstrating how we can restore function and beauty to our urban spaces for the long term. Nearly everything we treasure in the worldÕs most beautiful cities was built over a century ago. Cities like Prague, Paris, and Lisbon draw millions of visitors from around the world because of their exquisite architecture, walkable neighborhoods, and human scale. Yet a great deal of the knowledge and practice behind successful city planning has been abandoned over the last hundred yearsÑnot because of traffic, population growth, or other practical hurdles, but because of ill-considered theories emerging from Modernism and reactions to it. The errors of urban design over the last century are too great not to question. The solutions being offered todayÑsustainability, walkability, smart and green technologiesÑhint at what has been lost and what may be regained, but they remain piecemeal and superficial. In The Art of Classic Planning, architect and planner Nir Haim Buras documents and extends the time-tested and holistic practices that held sway before the reign of Modernism. With hundreds of full-color illustrations and photographs that will captivate architects, planners, administrators, and developers, The Art of Classic Planning restores and revitalizes the foundations of urban planning. Inspired by venerable cities like Kyoto, Vienna, and Venice, and by the great successes of LÕEnfantÕs Washington, HaussmannÕs Paris, and BurnhamÕs Chicago, Buras combines theory and a host of examples to arrive at clear guidelines for best practices in classic planning for todayÕs world. The Art of Classic Planning celebrates the enduring principles of urban design and invites us to return to building beautiful cities."

The Art of Medieval Urbanism examines the role of monumental sculpture and architecture in the medieval cityscape, offering a pathbreaking interpretation of the relationships among art, architecture, and the history of urbanism. In the first study of its kind, Robert Maxwell shifts attention away from the great Gothic cities of the later Middle Ages to focus on the urban context of art making in the earlier Romanesque era. Maxwell concentrates on Parthenay, a flourishing town in eleventh- and twelfth-century Aquitaine. Exploring Parthenay's exceptionally well-preserved structures, the author charts two centuries of urban development in southwestern France. Drawing on the methods of historical anthropology, Maxwell brings the monumental arts into dialogue with courtly romance literature, the iconography of seals and coins, history writing, and contemporary mythologies of place to show how the urban experience inflected the invention of history, aristocratic self-fashioning, and urban identity. Maxwell's interdisciplinary approach shows that medieval urbanism should be understood as a fabric of constructed identities of history, self, and place grounded in the monumental arts. The Art of Medieval Urbanism offers a fresh model for urban studies and proposes a new approach to the study of medieval art by restoring an urban dimension to our view of Romanesque production.

A re-edition of Sébastien Marot's essay anthology Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory, originally published by the Architectural Association (AA) in 2003. Featuring a new introduction by the author, the book is part of a new series of essay anthologies entitled AA Documents. This book is a sub-urbanist manifesto. Its author, Sébastien Marot, challenges the dominant role of the programme in regulating the design project, and argues that instead attention should be redirected towards the site - the site read in depth, with an active regard for memory. Exploring this analysis, he considers in turn Frances Yates' book The Art of Memory, Sigmund Freud's analogy between the past of a city and the workings of memory, Robert Smithson's account of a tour of his suburban birthplace and Georges Descombes' design for a small park in the Geneva suburb where he spent his childhood. Marot's conclusion brings these different strands together and highlights, in memory, a precept that is essential to the renewal of current architecture. This AA Documents publication is a re-edition of Sébastien Marot's Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory, originally edited by Pamela Johnston and published by AA Publications in 2003. It is based on a 1999 text by Marot, translated from the French by Brian Holmes.

Trachtenberg's book exmines the urban transformation of Florence in the fourteenth century. Focusing on the creation of the Piazza della Signoria and the Piazza del Duomo, he documents in engaging detail how and why urban planners, in league with the civic government, enlarged these urban spaces. Articulating the design principles that served as the foundation for these urban renewal projects, Trachtenberg's book fundamentally revises our understanding of urban planning in the early modern period, countering the received claim that rational planning begins only in the Renaissance. His book also brings a new depth of understanding to the entire visual culture of Trecento Florence, demonstrating how many of the developments in painting, sculpture and architecture of this period form the basis of the achievements of the Quattrocento, particularly the discovery of perspective. Combining both empirical and post-structuralist methods, Trachtenberg's book is among the first, if not the first, to question critically many of the assumptions that have formed the basis of scholarship of Renaissance art since the sixteenth century.

Cities and Photography discusses the relationship between people and the city, visualized in photographs. It explores how photographs display attitudes, agency and vision in the way a city is documented and imagined. It provides a visually focused examination of the city and urbanism for a range of different disciplines - across the social sciences and humanities, photography and fine art. This book offers different perspectives from which to view social, political and cultural ideas about the city. It provides introductions to the theories useful to photographers addressing issues relating to urbanism, and to key photographic themes that inform cultural issues central to a discussion of urbanism (e.g. the street, the everyday, social conditions). A series of case studies, featuring international and contemporary photographic projects, provides a means with which to examine a range of issues, for example: regeneration and displacement, power and the institution, visions of modernity and post-modernity, psycho-geographical space. Cities and Photography interprets the city as a space that we inhabit on different conceptual and physical levels, and gives emphasis to how people operate within, relate to, and activate the city via construction, habitation and disruption.

This is the first book devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright's designs for remaking the modern city. Stunningly comprehensive, The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright presents a radically new interpretation of the architect’s work and offers new and important perspectives on the history of modernism. Neil Levine places Wright’s projects, produced over more than fifty years, within their historical, cultural, and physical contexts, while relating them to the theory and practice of urbanism as it evolved over the twentieth century. Levine overturns the conventional view of Wright as an architect who deplored the city and whose urban vision was limited to a utopian plan for a network of agrarian communities he called Broadacre City. Rather, Levine reveals Wright’s larger, more varied, interesting, and complex urbanism, demonstrated across the span of his lengthy career. Beginning with Wright’s plans from the late 1890s through the early 1910s for reforming residential urban neighborhoods, mainly in Chicago, and continuing through projects from the 1920s through the 1950s for commercial, mixed-use, civic, and cultural centers for Chicago, Madison, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Baghdad, Levine demonstrates Wright’s place among the leading contributors to the creation of the modern city. Wright’s often spectacular designs are shown to be those of an innovative precursor and creative participant in the world of ideas that shaped the modern metropolis. Lavishly illustrated with drawings, plans, maps, and photographs, this book features the first extensive new photography of materials from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright will serve as one of the most important books on the architect for years to come.

This book has one central theme: how, in the United Kingdom, can we create better cities and towns in which to live and work and play? What can we learn from other countries, especially our near neighbours in Europe? And, in turn, can we provide lessons for other countries facing similar dilemmas? Urban Britain is not functioning as it should. Social inequalities and regional disparities show little sign of going away. Efforts to generate growth, and spread it to the poorer areas of cities, have failed dismally. Much new urban development and redevelopment is not up to standard. Yet there are cities in mainland Europe, which have set new standards of high-quality sustainable urban development. This book looks at these best-practice examples – in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Scandinavia, – and suggests ways in which the UK and other countries could do the same. The book is in three parts. Part 1 analyses the main issues for urban planning and development – in economic development and job generation, sustainable development, housing policy, transport and development mechanisms – and probes how practice in the UK has fallen short. Part Two embarks on a tour of best-practice cities in Europe, starting in Germany with the country’s boosting of its cities’ economies, moving to the spectacularly successful new housing developments in the Netherlands, from there to France’s integrated city transport, then to Scandinavia’s pursuit of sustainability for its cities, and finally back to Germany, to Freiburg – the city that ‘did it all’. Part Three sums up the lessons of Part Two and sets out the key steps needed to launch a new wave of urban development and regeneration on a radically different basis.