Volume 38, Number 8 · April 25, 1991
Metropolitan Opera
By Robert M. Adams
The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities
by Richard Sennett
Knopf, 266 pp., $24.95
The Conscience of the Eye is the third volume of what has developed into a trilogy—or at least a triad—on urban culture. The first two volumes were The Fall of Public Man (1977) and Palais Royal (1986). The first was a sociological study, the second a novel; the present book combines in about equal proportions reflections on architecture and on the cultures in which building is grounded, meditations on the visions and aversions people come to have in cities, and vignettes of New York City. In trying to suggest what has gone wrong with the modern city Sennett provides additional informal divagations on such matters as the work of Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin, on the history of the drama, and the story of glass.
Review, 3127 words
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