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

Kostof, Spiro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0821225995 ISBN 13: 9780821225998

Publisher: Bulfinch Pr, 1992

Synopsis

The City Assembled is the companion volume to Sprio Kostof's The City Shaped(reissued in paperback by Bulfinch, spring 1999) and continues Kostof's unique study of urban landscape and process. Moving from the historical and cultural overviews of the city in the first book, Kostof descends into the streets, sidewalks, squares, markets, and waterfronts of the city and presents a detailed urban anatomy. The book is organized thematically around the structural phenomena of the city-the city edge, street, public space, the marketplace, and the realities of cultural and ecomomic segregation-and explores the customs, practicalities, and biases behind the elements of the city. In every instance, Professor Kostof follows a far-ranging story up to the present to illustrate how fresh the discussion remains today. In the past, the various 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, wars, 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.

The story is also told in over three hundred drawings, prints, paintings, and photographs that illustrate not only typical elements of a city, such as a colonnaded street of ancient Palmyra, but also specific uses of particular elements, such as Prague's Wenceslas Square. The City Assembled is a fascinating account of the urban experience, writte, like The City Shaped, for general readers and professionals alike.

About this title

About the Author

Spiro Kostof (1936-1991) was Professor of Architectural History at the University of California at Berkley, and also taught at Yale, Columbia, MIT, and Rice universities.

From Library Journal

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: 0821225995
• ISBN 13: 9780821225998
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Tobias Richard
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352