Volume 16, Number 1 · January 28, 1971
Cities and "The City"
By Roger Sale
Cities on the Move
by Arnold Toynbee
Oxford, 257 pp., $6.75
The Meaning of the City
by Jacques Ellul
Eerdmans, 209 pp., $5.95
Beyond Habitat
by Mosche Safdie
MIT, 244 pp., $10.00
The Architecture Machine
by Nicholas Negroponte
MIT, 153 pp., $5.95
By all rights, these four books on various urban matters should be all wrong. Two are European, somber, gloomy, full of long views taken as though from the long end of a telescope, seeing God and History but seldom anything so complicated, dirty, noisy, or interesting as a city. The other two are North American, young, cheerful, uninterested in history, seeing new ways of designing houses and environments where the cities their projects are placed in appear as through the right end of the telescope. They are full of pictures of things that look as if they're made of origami, without anything so complicated, dirty, noisy, or interesting as a city. On the one hand history is everything, and it moves in long, decisive swoops and whirls; on the other hand, history never happened and the most interesting facts about people are that they like sunlight and privacy. Yet it turns out that none of these four books is worthless, that the perspectives they offer can be useful, and not simply as ways of reminding us of what we always knew.
Review, 5397 words
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