The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form Through History - Hardcover

Kostof, Spiro; Castillo, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821219308 ISBN 13: 9780821219300

Publisher: Bulfinch Pr, 1992

Synopsis

Spiro Kostof's previous book, The City Shaped, examined ways in which cities develop through history, treating them as complete entities and analyzing the various categories into which they fall. Now, in what is both a companion volume and an independent study, he traces the component elements that make up different types of cities: streets, public places, urban divisions (religious, political, and social), and the fringe area where city and countryside meet.
In every instance, Professor Kostof follows a story that ranges widely in time and place up to the present to indicate that the discussion remains fresh and engages our own time in unexpected ways. In the past, all the elements of a city evolved in response to a variety of pressures. Today they are usually the result of planning decisions. In a final chapter, Kostof considers "urban process" - the effect on cities of natural disasters, war, and comprehensive redevelopment, compared with incremental growth and change. His book is thus an exercise in architectural and social history, a case study for the present, and a pointer for the future. Urban form is never innocent of social content: it is merely the matrix within which we organize daily life, and we have strong opinions about it. Modernism was a harsh intrusion in the development of almost every theme. The current recovery from the less tolerant aspects of that doctrine has made us look again at what it is that we treasure in the traditional city, and how we can recharge the old urban forms with present-day common sense.
The story is also told in over three hundred drawings, prints, paintings, and photographs that trace not only patterns but uses, from the colonnaded street of ancient Palmyra to the recent demonstrations in Prague's Wenceslas Square.

About this title

Reviews

This final book by noted architectural historian Kostof, who died in 1991, is a companion to The City Shaped ( LJ 10/1/91; LJ's Best Books of 1991, LJ 1/92, p. 56). Here he considers the parts that make up the city through time--walls, urban divisions, public places, the street, and the urban process. The book is wide-ranging in time and space and presents the fruits of a lifetime of looking, but it is fragmented, appearing to be almost an assembly of notes for a more considered work or for The City Shaped. Still, the author is an astute observer, and his remarks are frequently illuminating for specialists and novices alike. This survey of the microparts of cities will be of interest primarily to professionals and historians but also to urban inhabitants, the same audience addressed by William Whyte ( City: Rediscovering Its Center , LJ 2/1/89).
- Jack Perry Brown, Art Inst. of Chicago Lib.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bulfinch Pr
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0821219308
• ISBN 13: 9780821219300
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Tobias Richard
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320