http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/774351

Global city blues

"Much of the architecture and town planning of the past fifty years has been based on an unsubstantiated optimism about the promise of modernity. In our rush to embrace the future, we invented new ways of building that rejected the past and sent people headlong into a placeless limbo where they are isolated from each other and cut off from such basic experiences of location as weather and the time of day. In [this book], renowned architect Daniel Solomon presents a perceptive overview and insightful assessment of how the power and seductiveness of modernist ideals led us on this wayward path. Through a series of independent but linked essays, he takes the reader on a personal expedition, introducing people, places, and ideas that have shaped thinking about planning and building and that laid the foundation for his beliefs about the world we inhabit and the kind of world we should strive to create. Solomon discussess alternatives to modernist orthodoxy, including the ideas and precepts of New Urbanism, a reform movement he helped found that has risen to prominence in the past decade. These alternatives offer a vital counterbalance to the forces of sprawl, urban disintegration, and placelessness that have so transformed the contemporary landscape"--Bookjacket.

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