Frank Lloyd Wright's clients often complained about the furniture he designed for the homes and offices he built for them. Why? It was often ill-suiteFrank Lloyd Wright's clients often complained about the furniture he designed for the homes and offices he built for them. Why? It was often ill-suited for the uses to which it was supposed to be put, out of scale or proportion to the users, or had some other defect that suggested he wasn't actually thinking about the people who would use them.
After reading this book, you may well conclude that most Brand Name Architects don't do that. Rowan Moore writes about architecture as if people mattered: this book is stuffed full of ego, sex, money and power, things usually not found in writing about architecture but things that all factor into what gets built and why.
This is actually a morality tale of sorts, and it has a hero: Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, who he considers the most underrated modern architect of the 20th century. He makes a compelling argument for that view by contrasting her buildings, and more importantly how she arrived at them, to the other structures thrown up over history assessed in this book.
At the end, you may not agree with his critique of architectural thinking, but you can't finish this book and not have your thinking on the subject changed, at least a little bit....more
Anyone with a interest in American business, Southwestern architecture, the history of American restaurants and the story of American railroading shouAnyone with a interest in American business, Southwestern architecture, the history of American restaurants and the story of American railroading should read this history of the British immigrant who invented the chain restaurant in cahoots with his early sponsor, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. The name "Fred Harvey" became synonymous with delicious food served efficiently by courteous, friendly women all along the Santa Fe route, and Harvey's restaurants and hotels - and later, his dining car service - helped establish the Santa Fe's reputation for first-class passenger travel.
The story of Harvey and the company he founded - which was known only by his name for its entire existence - gets a thorough and entertaining telling in former _Philadelphia_ magazine staffer Stephen Fried's biohistory. The Harvey family, with its strong-willed women and its disgruntled siblings, is as fascinating as its patriarch's creation of American dining as we now know it.
I came on the scene after Fred Harvey, the company, had long since moved from my forever hometown of Kansas City - one of those disgruntled siblings moved it to his hometown of Chicago - and been sold to a conglomerate that presided over its slow, sad demise. I was old enough to remember the Harvey Houses - his more casual restaurants, the last of which closed in the mid-1960s - and to still see "Meals by Fred Harvey" on Santa Fe dining car menus, but the glory days of Fred Harvey had long since passed by then. This book revisits them and reveals why they were so glorious.
Also: Try the recipes in the back of the book....more
There are actually two Washingtons: Washington the National Capital and Washington the City. The two inhabit the same physical space but differ in a nThere are actually two Washingtons: Washington the National Capital and Washington the City. The two inhabit the same physical space but differ in a number of respects that only become obvious after spending some time outside the city's monumental core. Most of us know a lot about that first one thanks to the media and the political class. This book about how "America's Subway" came to be brings the second Washington to the fore.
Transportation historians will appreciate Schrag's descriptions of the Metro's design and engineering, driven by a conscious intent to avoid replicating the cramped, depressing subways of New York, Philadelphia and Boston. The story of how local civic activists continually worked to outfox powerful Congressmen intent on ramming a network of freeways through the city, and largely succeeded despite the fact that District residents had no say whatsoever in their own governance and affairs at the time, brings to the fore the ways the first and second Washingtons differ from each other.
Students of American society will note that, as the book's title indicates, the Washington Metro is also the product of a unique period in American history, the era when the belief in government as a force for good with the capacity to transform society and cure its defects reached its high-water mark. The fate of rapid transit in cities outside Washington, a number of which built new lines or systems from roughly 1970 to 2000, only serves to underscore the unique mix of time, place and people that made the second-busiest subway system in the United States a reality.
"What kind of city do you want?" Activists in Washington's Mid-City section asked residents this stark question in the years leading up to Metro's construction. Today's U Street is the product of their answer to that question: revitalized, thanks in part to the subway line Mid-City residents insisted on, the last segment of the original 103-mile Metro system to be completed. Washington the City would be a far different - and far less appealing - place to live and work had Metro never been built, and this book tells us how the city avoided the grimmer fate of a number of large older U.S. cities....more
Libertarian Harvard economist Edward Glaeser sings the praises of everything the typical American metropolis is not - dense, intense, croweded, and diLibertarian Harvard economist Edward Glaeser sings the praises of everything the typical American metropolis is not - dense, intense, croweded, and did we say dense? - in this paean to the city.
He also suggests that our policies have kept cities from flourishing as much as they could....more
While it reads more like an extended Op-Ed than a book, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson's survey of contemporary black America is a perceptiWhile it reads more like an extended Op-Ed than a book, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson's survey of contemporary black America is a perceptive and thoughtful book. I found it laced with a strange nostalgia for Jim Crow-era black society, but given what the end of that forced solidarity has meant for those African-Americans he labels the Abandoned, perhaps that nostalgia is understandable, and maybe even forgivable. Some of his prescriptions on how best to resolve the plight of the Abandoned at the end of the book might surprise you. Worth reading by anyone who wants to get a handle on the more complex and somewhat paradoxical entity that too many of us still persist on thinking about as a unified whole, namely, African-American society today....more
I like to mix it up with people who do not share my worldview. If Bill Bishop is right, this makes me an American oddity.
According to this book, sinceI like to mix it up with people who do not share my worldview. If Bill Bishop is right, this makes me an American oddity.
According to this book, since the 1960s, Americans have been sorting themselves out into like-minded tribal communities, whose members reinforce one another's already-existing views, attitudes, and prejudices. The end product of this "Big Sort" is an increasingly polarized body politic, more ideologically pure parties, the urban-rural electoral split I've remarked on several discussion boards, and quite possibly the end of America as we've known it (a conclusion Bishop does not reach in the book, which ends with an answer posed in the form of a question).
Are we "one nation, after all"? You might indeed wonder after reading this book, which offers many useful insights into how our politics and culture reached its current curdled state....more
Say what you will about the combative former president/chancellor of Boston University, you really can't argue with the main point he makes in this shSay what you will about the combative former president/chancellor of Boston University, you really can't argue with the main point he makes in this short book based on a speech he gave to an AIA meeting in Texas: Our worship of "genius" in architecture has given us buildings that don't work. Instead of satisfying the needs of the clients, "genius" architects focus on ego -- their own and those of the people who commission them and the critics who write about their work. Can we return to a world where form follows function? Silber hopes so, and this book is his effort to get us back to that happier state....more
Anyone who has worked or taught in a university will appreciate this satirical novel set in an unnamed land-grant university in a Midwestern state witAnyone who has worked or taught in a university will appreciate this satirical novel set in an unnamed land-grant university in a Midwestern state with a strong resemblance to Iowa. Smiley, who manages to find the entire world in the cornfields of her native region, gets the personalities, idiosyncracies and bizarre internal politics of American academe exactly right in this book....more
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