Pulitzer-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger (Building Art) takes a fascinating, in-depth approach to seven cities as evolving spaces that reflect historical, political, and architectural ideas, bounded by their geography. His wit, intelligence, and insight may inspire readers-- even lifelong residents--to see these cities in an entirely new light: New York City, Paris, Chicago, Amsterdam, Rome, Singapore, and Los Angeles.
New York and Los Angeles serve as Goldberger's bookends, and he celebrates Manhattan's 1811 grid as "a brilliant exercise in flexibility and permissiveness." Just as the IRT subway line opened the way for Broadway theaters and newspapers such as the New York Times to relocate uptown in Manhattan, so, too, did the mid-20th-century freeways become the catalyst for further development in Los Angeles.
His specific examples point to world events. As Georges-Eugène Haussmann laid out the boulevards of Paris in the 19th century, he "reinvented... a route that was also a destination." Paris has given birth to the fláneur ("urban wanderer"), which encapsulates the Paris experience: "a city in which the act of observing the city embodies the essence of being in it." Consider that by 1870, Paris "had become the most modern, technologically driven city in the world." Yet Rome in 1870 was still ruled by the Vatican, and Italy had only just unified its various kingdoms. Goldberger points out that Rome is "a city of monuments without monumental settings." One stumbles upon the Trevi Fountain or Michelangelo's Piazza del Campidoglio. "The randomness of the city's urban fabric," Goldberger writes, "expresses the essence of Rome more powerfully than even the Colosseum."
Urban planning often reflects a country's view of its citizens. Amsterdam built Grachtengordel, the expanded area of canals and streets that radiates outward "in an unusual and precise geometric pattern of concentric semi-circles," while it was the center of world commerce in the 17th century. Here the rich, the middle class, and the poor lived side by side. Singapore, too, has dedicated public housing, and it's "rigorously integrated" with Chinese, Indian, Malayan, and Western citizens. Lee Kuan Yew, who won the country's first election as a self-governing nation in 1959, established this approach as a reaction against the segregated Singapore under the British. Chicago "is to architecture what Florence is to Renaissance art," Goldberger asserts. A boat ride down the Chicago River allows one to more fully appreciate its post-Great Chicago Fire architecture. He also notes that "there is no other American city whose entire waterfront is public."
With The Imperfect City, Goldberger offers architecture aficionados a robust consideration of how these cities evolved, but also a new angle for history buffs and a pleasure for both world and armchair travelers. --Jennifer M. Brown
Shelf Talker: Paul Goldberger celebrates smart city planning as well as serendipity, as he contemplates how people live in cities, and how those cities and its people shape one another.