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The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century. . - Review of books: of Cities And Citizenship - book review

Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Tom McDonough

The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century, by Joseph Rykwert, New York, Pantheon Books, 2000; 283 pp., $27.50

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In the opening pages of The Seduction of Place, his new book on the city, Anglo-American architect and historian Joseph Rykwert recounts his own formation during the declining years of the modernist movement. As a student in the mid-'60s, he writes, he became dissatisfied with the rationalist tone of the era's planning discussions and instead "began looking to historical precedent and at alternative approaches to the way many related to their environment." Assiduous reading in anthropology, particularly Claude Levi-Strauss's writings on traditional societies that had built their founding myths into the very structure of their villages and houses, led to an awareness of what he would call "the conceptual poverty of our city discourse," which treated space solely as the realm in which functional needs might be met, thereby occluding all other conceptions--"the psychological space, the cultural, the juridical, the religious," as Rykwert would later enumerate them. (1) Committed to returning these terms to a central place in our planning vocabulary, he eventually produced an unusual volume on the city in the ancient world, The Idea of a Town, published in 1976. Taking the strict grid of the Roman settlement as his primary subject, he posited that, rather than being based on rational or economic justifications, it grew out of and around "a system of custom and belief which made it a perfect vehicle for a culture and for a way of life." Even the most apparently logical of plans embodied complex meanings and metaphors for the society that produced it.

City form, in other words, was not some autonomous organic growth, nor was it dictated by ineluctable economic laws; it was instead "an artifact--an artifact of a curious kind, compounded of willed and random elements, imperfectly controlled. If it is related to physiology at all, it is more like a dream than anything else." Rykwert wrote of the metropolis as a human production--human in the full sense, as encompassing both conscious and unconscious motives. In effect, the figure pervading The Idea of a Town was the Italian fabulist Italo Calvino, whose collection of verbal sketches of legendary sites, Invisible Cities (1972), seamlessly blended observation and fantasy, myth and reality in a vision of the urban as a vast metaphor for humanity. (Rykwert in fact opened The Idea with an epigraph from Calvino.) Yet that fundamental insight which the ancient world had preserved in its foundation rites and physical monuments was lost in the modern world, had in fact been eradicated with the advent of modern city planning in Europe some time around the middle of the 19th century. This loss was only indicated in the 1976 book; almost a quarter of a century (and nine books) later Rykwert has returned to write its history in The Seduction of Place.

The subtitle of his new volume is rather deceptive, for while it proclaims itself a study of"the city in the twenty-first century," it might more accurately be called a balance sheet of the past century and a half of urban planning, viewed from the dawn of the new millennium. Those searching for futurological predictions about the explosive growth of Third World conurbations or the latest style trends in architecture will accordingly be disappointed. The Seduction of Place instead offers its readers a condensed, idiosyncratic tour of modern architecture and urban design, one aimed at accounting for the decisions that have brought us to our present impasse. Rykwert's history is certainly not a chronicle of impersonal forces or abstract systems of thought; nor is it one in which the canonical masterpieces of modern architecture are foregrounded. It is rather a history of individuals--"planners, architects, politicians"--who largely without conscious intent gradually relinquished the arduous, emotionally fraught sense of communal responsibility for the urban environment in favor of a reassuring set of "scientific," "rational" standards. It offers an examination of the poverty of our city discourse, and an account of some ways it might be enriched.

The Seduction of Place provides a history of the ever more totalizing solutions which have been proposed to ameliorate the problems of the modern city. Those problems had their roots in the tremendous growth of urban populations that occurred at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, during the Industrial Revolution. Yet rather than view this as an inevitable result of indifferent economic forces, Rykwert in the chapter titled "How We Got There" insists on the contingent nature of such developments, and on the almost accidental nature of the technological innovations which made them possible. Utopian reformers, from Robert Owen to Charles Fourier, quickly responded to the atrocious living conditions of workers in early factories, and in a chapter called "First Aid" Rykwert details these thinkers' sweeping plans for everything from model workplaces to ideal cities and the global reorganization of social life. It was the boundless ambition of such projects, Rykwert suggests, that laid the foundation for the 20th century's modernist schemes, which also would embrace a vision of the rational reconstruction of the world.

The Seduction of Place: The City in the Twenty-First Century. . - Review of books: of Cities And Citizenship - book review

Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Tom McDonough

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