Witold Rybczynski has written about architecture and urbanism for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Home and the award-winning A Clearing in the Distance, as well as The Biography of a Building, The Mysteries of the Mall, and Now I Sit Me Down. The recipient of the National Building Museum's 2007 Vincent Scully Prize, he lives with his wife in Philadelphia, where he is emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
In this elegant, concise and unfortunately unillustrated historical survey of North American urbanism, architectural historian Rybczynski (The Most Beautiful House in the World) tells more than the familiar story of the life and death of American cities. Resisting the depressingly common equation of grime and dilapidation to urban authenticity, Rybczynski argues that ``city'' and ``suburban'' are categories as polemical as they are descriptive. There are familiar villains here‘Rybczynski assails the cul-de-sac entanglements of cookie-cutter subdivisions, and his assessment of the 1950s public housing projects that grafted European modernist ideas onto the North American cityscape with tragic results for the poor is withering. But there are also unexpected heroes, most notably the garden suburbs of the 1920s and '30s (including his own neighborhood, Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill), which combined good design with strong civic consciousness to create urban spaces outside the traditional city. While Rybczynski admits a nostalgic preference for old-fashioned downtowns, he acknowledges that in most places, America's inextinguishable urban impulse has migrated elsewhere. (Sept.)
Architectural and urban historian Rybczynski (The Most Beautiful House in the World, LJ 4/1/89) has something to say about the shape of American cities, how they got that way, and how they inevitably contrast with their counterparts in Europe given the development of this country and our distincitve set of values. In succinct, accessible style, he moves from the flourishing of towns and cities in Europe to Tocqueville's assessment of the New World's urban efforts, to a sharp condemnation of urban planning in the last decades as a violation of America's values of spaciousness, choice, and self-sufficiency. At times the book seems a bit breezy, but Rybczynski can toss of terrific insights, e.g., conditions in the New World "gave American towns an independence of spirit, but also reinforced the general assumption that urban self-sufficiency was was the normal state of affairs"‘which was certainly not true in the rest of the world and, he points out, has created some of the problems we have today. A fine book; recommended for most collections.‘Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
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