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Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City
What do our cities mean to us? How do we experience them? Some of the answers (and many more questions) are to be found in the unexpected spaces of the metropolis.
Urban living - the ways we use and inhabit places and the ways our lives are shaped by those places - is illuminated in the series of provocative views presented here.
Shopping in London to squatting in Amsterdam. Spatial cleansing in New York to modernising Venice. Suffragettes to working women of colour. Bohemian Berlin cafes to Naples street markets. Prostitution to surveillance. Downtown Sao Paolo to suburban Manchester. Berthold Lubetkin to Jules Dassin. Skateboarding in Los Angeles to speeding on the Westway.
Strangely Familiar is a book about the unexpected, about the vitality and complexity of the everyday. From the curious to the popular, from the virtuous to the terrifying, the architectures of modern life are here laid bare.
Contributors: Elisabetta Andreoli, Iain Borden, M. Christine Boyer, Iain Chambers, Jonathan Charley, Barry Curtis, Dolores Hayden, Joe Kerr, Sandy McCreery, Doreen Massey, William Menking, Jane Rendell, Edward W. Soja, Lynne Walker, Elizabeth Wilson
Urban living - the ways we use and inhabit places and the ways our lives are shaped by those places - is illuminated in the series of provocative views presented here.
Shopping in London to squatting in Amsterdam. Spatial cleansing in New York to modernising Venice. Suffragettes to working women of colour. Bohemian Berlin cafes to Naples street markets. Prostitution to surveillance. Downtown Sao Paolo to suburban Manchester. Berthold Lubetkin to Jules Dassin. Skateboarding in Los Angeles to speeding on the Westway.
Strangely Familiar is a book about the unexpected, about the vitality and complexity of the everyday. From the curious to the popular, from the virtuous to the terrifying, the architectures of modern life are here laid bare.
Contributors: Elisabetta Andreoli, Iain Borden, M. Christine Boyer, Iain Chambers, Jonathan Charley, Barry Curtis, Dolores Hayden, Joe Kerr, Sandy McCreery, Doreen Massey, William Menking, Jane Rendell, Edward W. Soja, Lynne Walker, Elizabeth Wilson
- GenresArchitectureArtEssays
96 pages, Paperback
First published December 28, 1995
About the author
Iain Borden
38 books17 followersIain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, England.
His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.
Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.
To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.
His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.
Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.
To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.
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