Volume 35, Number 19 · December 8, 1988
Lost Worlds
By Peter Partner
Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment
by Eugene Victor Walter
University of North Carolina Press, 253 pp., $10.95 (paper)
The Architecture of Exile
by Stanley Tigerman
Rizzoli, 192 pp., $35.00
The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World
by Joseph Rykwert
MIT Press, 242 pp., $15.00 (paper)
All three books under review, though each in a quite different way, are concerned with man's loss of a religious attitude toward his environment. They seem to imply that the end of the old cosmologies and the weakening of the old religions have deprived us of the power to situate ourselves in relation to the moving forces of the universe. Losing hold on man's place in the cosmos has had, they say, disintegrating effects on the way we make our local habitats. According to Joseph Rykwert, 'We have lost all the beautiful certainty about the way the world works.' For him this has had especially deplorable results for our cities, which have lost the religious defenses against disorder and squalor enjoyed by their predecessors in the ancient world. He sees the religious and cultural traditions that preserved the buildings and cities of ancient and medieval civilization as irreparably destroyed:
Review, 5010 words
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