Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World

Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World

by Wade Graham
Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World

Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World

by Wade Graham

Paperback

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Overview

From the acclaimed landscape designer, historian and author of American Eden, a lively, unique, and accessible cultural history of modern cities—from suburbs, downtown districts, and exurban sprawl, to shopping malls and “sustainable” developments—that allows us to view them through the planning, design, architects, and movements that inspired, created, and shaped them.

Dream Cities explores our cities in a new way—as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose imagined cities became the blueprints for the world we live in.

From the nineteenth century to today, what began as visionary concepts—sometimes utopian, sometimes outlandish, always controversial—were gradually adopted and constructed on a massive scale in cities around the world, from Dubai to Ulan Bator to London to Los Angeles. Wade Graham uses the lives of the pivotal dreamers behind these concepts, as well as their acolytes and antagonists, to deconstruct our urban landscapes—the houses, towers, civic centers, condominiums, shopping malls, boulevards, highways, and spaces in between—exposing the ideals and ideas embodied in each.

From the baroque fantasy villages of Bertram Goodhue to the superblocks of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City to the pseudo-agrarian dispersal of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, our upscale leafy suburbs, downtown skyscraper districts, infotainment-driven shopping malls, and “sustainable” eco-developments are seen as never before. In this elegantly designed and illustrated book, Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant, obsessed, and sometimes megalomaniacal designers, revealing the foundations of today’s varied municipalities. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern urban world.

Illustrated with 59 black-and-white photos throughout the text.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062196323
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 01/24/2017
Pages: 352
Sales rank: 1,083,044
Product dimensions: 5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Wade Graham is a Los Angeles–based garden designer, historian, and writer whose work on the environment, landscape, urbanism, and the arts has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, Outside, and other publications. An adjunct professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, he is the author of American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

1 Castles: Bertram Goodhue and the Romantic City 1

2 Monuments: Daniel Burnnam and the Drdored City 41

3 Slabs: Le Corbusier, Abbert Mosses, and the Rational City 77

4 Homesteads: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Anticity 115

5 Corals: Jane Jacobs, Andres Daany, and the Self-Organizing City 153

6 Malls: Victor Gruen Jon Jerde, an a the Shopping City 193

7 Habitats: Kenzo Tange, Norman Foster, and the Techno-Ecological City 243

Acknowledgments 282

Notes 283

Index 301

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