The Age of Spectacle: The Rise and Fall of Iconic Architecture

In Dubai, a luxury apartment block is built in the shape of a giant iPod. In China, President Xi Jinping denounces the trend of constructing "bizarre" new buildings in wacky shapes and colors. In Cincinnati, celebrity architect Zaha Hadid is paid millions to design a single "iconic’ structure"—with the hope of single-handedly transforming the region’s ailing fortunes. These incidents are all part of the same story: the rise of the age of spectacle. Over the last 50 years, there has been a revolution in how our cities operate. Here, Tom Dyckhoff tells the story of how architecture became obsessed with the flashy, the monumental and the ostentatious—and how we all have to live with the consequences. Exploring cityscapes from New York to Beijing, Dyckhoff shows that we are living through a fundamental transformation in how our urban spaces work. The corporate explosion of the last few decades has fundamentally shifted the relationship between architects, politicians and cities’ inhabitants, fostering innovation, but also facilitating vanity projects and commercial power-grabs. Timely, passionate and bursting with new ideas, The Age of Spectacle is both an examination of how 21st century cities work, and a manifesto for a radically new kind of urbanism.