Jonathan Barnett is a believer (as am I) that architectural ideas have had a vital role in shaping cities. To bolster his assertion he lays out in City Design a rich history of the styles, movements, and ideas that have shaped cities from the Renaissance forward. He puts in context everything from “garden cities” to “megastructures” and places these movements in the broader arc of civic history. Particularly interesting is Barnett’s interweaving of landscape design and architecture, since few books have looked at the interdependence of the two fields and their effects on city design.
Many of Barnett’s illustrations are new. If there’s a fault, it is that some of the plans are less than two inches square. And what forensic urban designer, no matter how many times he’s seen them before, doesn’t take pleasure in perusing—without a magnifying glass—Unwin and Parker’s plan for Letchworth Village or Sitte’s plan for a garden district in Marienberg. The tiny drawings are accompanied by a tiny Univers typeface.
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