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Newspaper Article
Ideas and structures behind today's cities
2016
Overview
\"Dream Cities\" is a \"field guide\" to seven of those visions, each given a one-word title. Three are specific building types: \"monuments,\" \"malls\" and \"slabs\" (high-rise towers). And three are urban forms, although in fact they are profoundly anti-urban. These Mr. [Wade Graham] classifies as \"castles\" (his terms for romantic suburbs), \"homesteads\" (contemporary suburban sprawl) and \"corals\" (the neotraditional towns of the New Urbanism). \"Habitats,\" his last case study, is something of an outlier, somewhere between a building and a city. It refers to those self-contained high-tech megastructures that were briefly fashionable in the 1960s, only to be discredited by the energy crisis of the 1970s and then reborn recently in the form of \"techno-ecologies.\" Norman Foster's provocative Gherkin building in London is perhaps its best known representative. This, Mr. Graham tells us, in what is probably meant to be a hopeful note, is \"without question, the way the world now wants to build.\" The modern shopping mall is the one architectural form in \"Dream Cities\" that is purely commercial in function, but even it, Mr. Graham argues, was visionary in its original conception. This was due almost entirely to Victor Gruen, the Viennese architect who fled the Nazis in 1938 and became America's most prolific builder of malls and shopping centers. In 1943 he proposed a model shopping center in Syracuse that would have had a communal as well as a commercial dimension, including a post office, a library, a public auditorium and even a nursery school. His ideas were swiftly imitated and in the process vulgarized; in the end, the \"communal\" component of the mall shriveled down to a few benches and lampposts, which was a source of great bitterness to Gruen, who returned to Vienna in 1968. For the rest of his life, whenever described as \"the father of the mall,\" he reacted with wrath: \"I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments.\"
Publisher
New York Times Company
Subject
