Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World
By Wade Graham
3.5/5
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About this ebook
From the acclaimed landscape designer, historian and author of American Eden, a lively, unique, and accessible cultural history of modern cities—from suburbs, downtown districts, and exurban sprawl, to shopping malls and “sustainable” developments—that allows us to view them through the planning, design, architects, and movements that inspired, created, and shaped them.
Dream Cities explores our cities in a new way—as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose imagined cities became the blueprints for the world we live in.
From the nineteenth century to today, what began as visionary concepts—sometimes utopian, sometimes outlandish, always controversial—were gradually adopted and constructed on a massive scale in cities around the world, from Dubai to Ulan Bator to London to Los Angeles. Wade Graham uses the lives of the pivotal dreamers behind these concepts, as well as their acolytes and antagonists, to deconstruct our urban landscapes—the houses, towers, civic centers, condominiums, shopping malls, boulevards, highways, and spaces in between—exposing the ideals and ideas embodied in each.
From the baroque fantasy villages of Bertram Goodhue to the superblocks of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City to the pseudo-agrarian dispersal of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, our upscale leafy suburbs, downtown skyscraper districts, infotainment-driven shopping malls, and “sustainable” eco-developments are seen as never before. In this elegantly designed and illustrated book, Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant, obsessed, and sometimes megalomaniacal designers, revealing the foundations of today’s varied municipalities. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern urban world.
Illustrated with 59 black-and-white photos throughout the text.
Wade Graham
Wade Graham is a Los Angeles–based garden designer, historian, and writer whose work on the environment, landscape, urbanism, and the arts has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, Outside, and other publications. An adjunct professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, he is the author of American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are.
Read more from Wade Graham
Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Dream Cities
8 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Overall a good overview of the various different trends that have influenced modern city planning. The only chapter that dragged a bit was the one on metabolism and megastructures, which struggled to bring together the disparate elements being covered, and I found was only lively when covering Expo 67. As it is the concluding chapter, ending on the note of Foster's Apple spaceship building doesn't really help to integrate all of the previous chapters; a separate concluding chapter would have been better.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Enjoyable as a basic intro to architectural styles, but heavy on ideas and weak on practical matters. Dragged when giving too much backstory - and while I’m not an architect, felt there are more styles than those mentioned.