THE SEDUCTION OF PLACE P

by Joseph Rykwert

The subtitle to this, the tenth book by architecture professor (and lively writer) Joseph Rykwert--namely, "The City in the Twenty-First Century and Beyond"--is a whopping misnomer. It is only in the final chapter that Rykwert pays attention (and briskly, even then) to urban developments of recent years and to what we might expect in the 100 years to come. What this book really is, despite what its subtitlers intended, is at once a broad-ranging and satisfyingly detailed social history of some of the great cities of the modern world (mostly the Western one, with a marked emphasis on the two cities Rykwert calls home--New York and London--plus Paris) and an inquiry into how well they have served the material and spiritual lives of the people who inhabit them.

Ranging comfortably and coherently back and forth between the Old World and the New, Rykwert begins with the Industrial Revolution, its factories, the throngs of poor country people that flooded the cities to work in them, and the subsequent 150-year challenge faced by urban centers to house, transport, and entertain these throngs cheaply, space-consciously, and hygienically. But Seduction of Place is not so much a people's history of the city as it is a vibrantly researched and chronicled play-by-play of the big public--and some private--works of the major metropolises. The book also tackles the luminaries--including Haussmann, Olmstead and Vaux, L'Enfant, and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (who pioneered the enduring school of axial planning at Paris' Ecole Polytechnique)--whose names are often uttered in the same breath as the parks, boulevards, and edifices they brought to life.

Social critics like Tocqueville, Marx, Engels, Fourier, and Ruskin are just as well-represented here, however, ably providing the basis for Rykwert's persistent question of what cities ought to be and how responses to that have diverged and evolved over the years, apart from what they have become, for better or ill, and how they got that way. Even though the book takes a more or less familiar course through the 20th century--from the emergence of subways, skyscrapers, and modernism through postwar urban planning, suburban sprawl, and subsequent urban decay and attempts at renewal--Rykwert knows when to dart away from well-known people, places, and things to chronicle the planning of lesser-known English "New Towns" or of distinctly 20th-century cities like New Delhi, Islamabad, Australia's Canberra, and--rather famously--Brasilia, the ultimate "zoned" city.

The final chapter pays the requisite nod to the postmodernist implications of, for example, Celebration, Florida, (Disney's controversial new spin on the "company town") but is really distinguished by Rykwert's startlingly on-the-mark reading of how such wildly popular mega-museums as the new international Guggenheim franchise (with Gehry's Bilbao "branch" currently eclipsing Wright's New York "flagship") have come to best personify the encroachment of corporate globalization in the urban civic realm. It is a fitting conclusion for a book that manages so gracefully to wed an engrossing history of urban growth with the deeper intellectual, cultural, and ethical questions it raises--the very questions that the speculators, preservationists, and "ordinary citizens" will still have to answer in creating and sustaining the great cities of the 21st century. --Timothy Murphy

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, History, Urban Studies, Urban, Urbanism, Art

Paperback

First published September 19, 2000

About the author

Joseph Rykwert CBE was Paul Philippe Cret Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the foremost architectural historians and critics of his generation. He spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom and America. He taught the history and theory of architecture at several institutions in Europe and North America. Rykwert is the author of many influential works on architecture, including The Idea of a Town (1963), On Adam's House in Paradise (1972), The Dancing Column (1996) and The Seduction of Place (2000). All his books have been translated into several languages.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mostly enjoyed Rykwerk’s book. It seems a bit like Lewis Mumford’s City in History tome in a smaller format. In short, I feel it might be better titled The Seduction of All the Crap I Know About. Not a slam – I can only hope to be able to someday collate whatever it is I should remember about the built world into a single publication, but as I selected it as a commuter selection, it’s not a very good read at 20 minutes a pop. Rykwerk, at the subtitle suggests, concludes with possible panaceas for the 21st century city’s inevitable urban malaise with fairly basic suggestions similar to what we’ve already read from Jane Jacobs, The New Urbanists, and even Peter Blake. In short, he proffers urban and architectural “solutions” that are pretty common sense but indeed oft-ignored or only lightly implemented in most capitalist societies. Not really a strong conclusion to such a densely filled book, but overall, a well written history of almost everything about cities.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the same time I have been reading Jane Jacobs' seminal book on American urban design, The Death and Rebirth of Great American Cities (New York: The Modern Library, 1993) and Joseph Rykwert's architectural history The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City (New York: Vintage Books, 2002). All of these books have been awakening in me a desire to explore concepts of space, and place and possibly one day develop these interests into a course on the history of space and place and bodies in American culture. Of the two urban books, Rykwert's is the more sophisticated. Although a history of architecture it is not a catalogue of styles and forms but rather a history of architectural ideas and how they have impacted architects and urban design. It is a beautifully although sometimes dense book, packed with a wealth of information on design ranging across the planet. Rykwert has a masterful understanding of architecture and its relationship to other art forms including fine art and literature. Jacobs' book remains one of the cornerstones for understanding American urban history and it is pleasure to finally uncover ideas that I had read in other books voiced by their original author. So many of the problems and strengths she outlined about urban design and decay have become incorporated into my own approach to thinking about cities that it is sometimes surprising to read the original diagnosis.

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its a topic I'm entirely unfamiliar with and under-educated: architectural history. I don't know anything about Rykwert's previous work and can't review this book based on any understanding of the field. I picked up the book because I was searching on goodreads and found a review of this book by someone who appeared to have common interests.

That said, I found the book very enlightening. The first several chapters, which were entirely historical, were much harder to push through. They were very important to Rykwert's work because they laid out a brief history of the development of urban centers and architecture within those cities. It wasn't until the final three chapters that I was finally captured. Rykwert seemed a bit more concerned with the development of the city's appearance (architecture) than its demographics or zoning. I suppose a book like that would be more of an interest to me than just architecture. He concludes the book with his recommendations for improving the city, where some of those topics are briefly touched. But that section was pretty short and somewhat broad considering his focus throughout the book was much narrower.

[Dan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was not happy with this book. I read it under the title The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century, and it was mostly, from my perspective, a collection of historical anecdotes about cities with very little narrative structure. I also was unable to detect an argument in this book.

Rykwert is clearly a brilliant guy, but I'm not sure what he was trying to do here.

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

decent book. analysis and opinion lacking until last chapter.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

hard work but rewarding, an excellent history of cities and a post 9/11 perspective for the future

[Matthew Flannery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty un-noteworthy book. It meandered, and felt like he wrote 200 pages just to finish up with some facts about New York.

[Kyla Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent history, that articulates the problems of the modern city in all their bewildering complexity, through their evolution. Intriguing mentions of the power of metaphor and other ways their inhabitants overwrite such forbidding environments hint at the way out.