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Cosmopolis: Yesterday's Cities of the Future
The twentieth century saw a grand procession of promises for the city. The great modern architect Le Corbusier dictated cities of glittering white towers planted in green parks, Frank Lloyd proposed cities with no downtown, cities spread across the countryside with each family on its homestead, and skyscraper utopians of the 1920s promised paradise on the one-hundredth floor with our airplane hangared next door. One thing was the city of tomorrow would put to shame the city of yesterday. Another thing was certain, we would be happier, more peaceful (and productive) people. Here is Le "Free, man tends to geometry." And if we followed the "radiant harmony" of his geometry, the world’s cities could become "irresistible forces stimulating collective enthusiasm, collective action, and general joy and pride, and inconsequence individual happiness everywhere . . . the modern world would emerge . . . and would beam around, powerful, happy, believing." There were others who promised deliverance through their brands of the right angle, the curvilinear road in the park, the tower of glass. Each fervently preached that his was the magic geometry that, like tumblers on a lock, would open the way to the good life. Cosmopolis is a pattern book of expectations, generously illustrated with a gathering of plans from the City Beautiful to the Italian Futurists, The Cité Industrielle, World’s Fair utopias, science fiction visions, and the grand plans of the Moderns. Cosmopolis is the story of the ideal city we never achieved, and the great plans that went into making-over precincts of our urban language.
172 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1990
104 people want to read
About the author
Howard Mansfield
33 books38 followersHoward Mansfield sifts through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. He writes about history, architecture, and preservation.
He is the author of thirteen books, including In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind Review said, “Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place… But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield’s In the Memory House.”
Among his other books are Turn & Jump, The Bones of the Earth and The Same Ax, Twice, which The New York Times said was “filled with insight and eloquence. A memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom.”
“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing,” said the writer and critic Guy Davenport. “He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”
His most recent book, Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers, is about Americans seeking their Promised Land, their utopia out on the horizon — which by definition, is ever receding before us.
In Chasing Eden we meet a gathering of Americans – the Shakers in the twilight of their utopia; the Wampanoags confronting the Pilgrims; the God-besotted landscape painters who taught Americans that in wilderness was Eden; and 40,000 Africans newly freed from slavery granted 40 acres and a mule – only to be swiftly dispossessed. These and other seekers were on the road to find out, all united by their longing to find in America “a revolution of the spirit.”
His forthcoming book, I Will Tell No War Stories, is a little different for Mansfield.
Shortly before his father died, he was cleaning out the old family home when he found a small, folded set of pages that had sat in a drawer for 65 years. It was a short journal of the bombing missions he had flown. He had no idea he’d kept this record. Airmen were forbidden to keep diaries.
He quickly read through it, drank it down in a gulp. Some of the missions he flew were harrowing, marked by attacking fighters, anti-aircraft cannon blowing holes in his plane, and wounding crewmen. They had limped back to England flying on three of the four engines with another engine threatening to quit. He’d seen bombers blown out of the sky, exploding into nothing – ten men, eighteen tons of aluminum with tons more of high explosives and fuel: Just gone. And they had to fly on.
His father, like most men of his generation, refused to talk about the war.
I Will Tell No War Stories is about undoing the forgetting in Mansfield's family and in a society that has hidden the horrors and cataclysm of a world at war. Some part of that forgetting was necessary for the veterans, otherwise how could they come home, how could they find peace?
I Will Tell No War Stories is, finally, about learning to live with history, a theme he has explored in some of my earlier books like In the Memory House and The Same Ax, Twice.
Mansfield has contributed to The New York Times, American Heritage, The Washington Post, Historic Preservation, The Threepenny Review, Yankee and other publications.
He is the author of thirteen books, including In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind Review said, “Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place… But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield’s In the Memory House.”
Among his other books are Turn & Jump, The Bones of the Earth and The Same Ax, Twice, which The New York Times said was “filled with insight and eloquence. A memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom.”
“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing,” said the writer and critic Guy Davenport. “He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”
His most recent book, Chasing Eden: A Book of Seekers, is about Americans seeking their Promised Land, their utopia out on the horizon — which by definition, is ever receding before us.
In Chasing Eden we meet a gathering of Americans – the Shakers in the twilight of their utopia; the Wampanoags confronting the Pilgrims; the God-besotted landscape painters who taught Americans that in wilderness was Eden; and 40,000 Africans newly freed from slavery granted 40 acres and a mule – only to be swiftly dispossessed. These and other seekers were on the road to find out, all united by their longing to find in America “a revolution of the spirit.”
His forthcoming book, I Will Tell No War Stories, is a little different for Mansfield.
Shortly before his father died, he was cleaning out the old family home when he found a small, folded set of pages that had sat in a drawer for 65 years. It was a short journal of the bombing missions he had flown. He had no idea he’d kept this record. Airmen were forbidden to keep diaries.
He quickly read through it, drank it down in a gulp. Some of the missions he flew were harrowing, marked by attacking fighters, anti-aircraft cannon blowing holes in his plane, and wounding crewmen. They had limped back to England flying on three of the four engines with another engine threatening to quit. He’d seen bombers blown out of the sky, exploding into nothing – ten men, eighteen tons of aluminum with tons more of high explosives and fuel: Just gone. And they had to fly on.
His father, like most men of his generation, refused to talk about the war.
I Will Tell No War Stories is about undoing the forgetting in Mansfield's family and in a society that has hidden the horrors and cataclysm of a world at war. Some part of that forgetting was necessary for the veterans, otherwise how could they come home, how could they find peace?
I Will Tell No War Stories is, finally, about learning to live with history, a theme he has explored in some of my earlier books like In the Memory House and The Same Ax, Twice.
Mansfield has contributed to The New York Times, American Heritage, The Washington Post, Historic Preservation, The Threepenny Review, Yankee and other publications.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 11, 2022
Good for what it is: a coffee table book collecting the designs of past architects. This period of time definitely had a heady aura, with so many convinced that they could design a perfect future without really paying much attention to practical realities. The text is mostly there to provide context, but the quotes from the architects and others definitely added something.
xx-dnf-skim-reference
March 21, 2019A coffee table book for architects and SF writers. Too boring for me. I'm not much into movies, but I think I'd have preferred a documentary of this. Also note that it was written before 9-11, but also that it doesn't seem absolutely relevant that it's so old because it is a history.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews