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Overview
For E. C. Relph, the landscape of late twentieth-century cities must be envisioned as a total environment—not just streets and buildings but billboards and parking meters as well. The Modern Urban Landscape traces the developments since 1880 in architecture, technology, planning, and society that have formed the visual context of daily life. Each of these shaping influences is often viewed in isolation, but Relph surveys the ways in which they have operated independently to create what we see when we walk down a street, shop in a mall, or stare through a windshield on an expressway.
Two sets of ideas and fashions, Relph argues, have had an especially important impact on urban landscapes in the twentieth century. An “internationalism” made possible by new building technologies and design ideologies has replaced regional style and custom as the dominant feature of city appearance, while a firm belief in the merits of self-consciousness has imposed logical analysis and technical manipulation on such commonplace objects as curbstones and park benches. “As a result,” writes Relph, “the modern urban landscape is both rationalized and artificial, which is another way of saying that it is intensely human.”
This edition features a new preface in which the author identifies the major visible changes in urban landscapes over the past thirty years, including destination architecture, coffee shops, condominium towers, revitalized downtown streets, and the creation of edge cities. He also considers the less visible yet pervasive impacts associated with the emergence of electronic technologies and sustainable development.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781421421506 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2016 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Preface to the 2016 Edition ix
Preface xvii
1 Introduction 1
2 Looking Back at the Future: Late Twentieth-century Landscapes in the 1890s 11
Victorian inequalities 12
Socialism and new technologies 13
Edward Bellamy's Boston in 2000 19
William Morris's future English landscape 20
Utopian realities 22
3 Old Styles and New Forms in Architecture: 1880-1930 25
Victorian architecture 26
The decline of the last classical revival 29
Building big and building tall 33
Early skyscrapers in Chicago 35
Skyscraper styles to 1930 37
The origins of downtown 43
4 The Invention of Modern Town Planning: 1890-1940 49
Precedents for modern town planning 49
City beautiful and master planning 52
Garden cities 55
The landscape of garden cities 57
Neighbourhood units 62
The Radburn principle 65
Zoning 67
Unrealised ideal city plans: Radiant City and Broadacre 69
Comments on the invention of town planning 74
5 Ordinary Landscapes of the First Machine Age: 1900-40 76
Parkways and expressways 77
Mechanical streets and the municipal landscape 79
Early commercial strips and the decline of main street 83
Conspicuous mass consumption 89
Invidious scientific management 93
6 Modernism and Internationalism in Architecture: 1900-40 98
Sources of modernism 99
Functional futurism 102
An interlude - World War I 105
The Bauhaus 106
Modernist housing projects 109
Le Corbusier 112
Principles of modernism in the work of Mies van der Rohe 114
The international movement 117
7 Landscapes in an Age of Illusions: 1930 to the Present 119
Microscopic manipulation and anonymous expertise 120
Visible effects of new technologies 122
Adaptability, mimicry, opacity, ephemerality 126
Imagineering 129
The megamachine with its electronic eyes on the street 130
Nuclearism 133
8 Planning the Segregated City: 1945-75 138
Standardised planning procedures and planning by numbers 140
Clean-sweep planning and urban renewal 144
Pedestrian precincts, plazas and tunnels 150
State and corporate new towns 153
Highway design and the demise of the street 158
How to recognise a planned place 162
9 The Corporatisation of Cities: 1945- 166
Manifestations of corporatisation 167
Towers of conspicuous administration 168
Levittown and the corporate suburb 172
Corporate malls 178
Commercial strips - from casual chaos to television road 181
Corporatisation, planning and architecture 185
Commodification and the seductive corporate city 187
10 Modernist and Late-Modernist Architecture: 1945- 190
Mies van der Rohe and the skin and bones style 191
Le Corbusier and the concrete cage 195
No-frills modernism and new brutalism 198
Expressionism 201
Late-modernist architecture 202
11 Post-Modernism in Planning and Architecture: 1970- 211
The old is new again 213
Commercial and residential gentrification 215
Heritage planning and preservation 221
Post-modern architecture 224
Urban design 229
Community planning 231
Late twentieth-century eclecticism 236
12 Modernist Cityscapes and Post-Modernist Townscapes 238
Design phases in twentieth-century townscape 239
Qualities of modernist cityscapes 242
Qualities of post-modern townscapes 252
A modernist or post-modernist future landscape? 258
A unity of disunity - concluding comments 259
Bibliography 268
Index 274