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The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century by Joseph Rykwert
(Pantheon Books, 283 pp., $27.50)
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities by Janet L. Abu-Lughod
(University of Minnesota Press. 580 pp., $39.95)
JOSEPH RYKWERT IS a distinguished architectural historian whose previous books have dealt with such subjects as the course of architecture and architectural thought from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century (The First Moderns), the role of the classical orders-Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and the like-in the history of architecture (The Dancing Column), and the city in the ancient classical world of Greece and Rome (The Idea of a Town). Such a background might lead anyone to look at the disordered and sprawling and scarcely planned contemporary city with alarm, and indeed Rykwert does refer to his book as a "polemic." But what he is for and what he is against are not fully spelled out and not easy to grasp.
One easy target is modernism in architecture and planning, and what it has done to the contemporary city. Rykwert does begin his book with an account of how cities were rebuilt after World War II, in part under the influence of modernism in architecture and planning, and he is not at all happy with the result. (Who is?) "The International Congress of Modern Architecture (cue); Rykwert remarks, "the organization that had promoted the ideas that motivated most of the planners and architects of the immediate postwar years, came under attack from within. At its tenth meeting in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, it broke up." It is hardly necessary to note the irony in the location: a city such as Dubrovnik, which all modern architects and planners admire, could never have emerged or been built under the guidelines of the cry.
But Rykwert knows too much simply to fulminate against modernism. Architects and planners have to work under the restraints imposed by economics and politics, and it is too simple to ascribe our unhappiness with contemporary cities to their designers. Yet it is also too easy simply to denounce the profit-maximizing builders and the developers, and Rykwert does not leap to such an explanation either. Knowing too much moderates a polemic, and that is the case with this one.
And yet a...