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London, Paris, Venice, New York, Rome, Constantinople -- the
cities of the world have captured man's imagination for generations. In this lively,
sumptuously illustrated book, the author of the best-selling Life in the English
Country House takes us on a tour of cities and their people through the centuries.
Focusing on carefully selected cities at critical periods in their history, Mark
Girouard looks at their architecture and design in the light of the needs of the
men and women who lived in them. Girouard begins with
Constantinople, the biggest, richest, and most sophisticated city of the ninth
and tenth centuries, evoking its jewelled wealth, its churches, its arcades and
bazaars, its painted women. He then discusses the manufacturing and trading towns
of the Middle Ages -- cities such as Florence, Siena, Ghent, Bruges, and Venice
-- describing the texture of life there in terms of the economic structure, religion,
medical care, sanitation, dress, and entertainments. Girouard tells us about Renaissance
Rome, the precursor of the great modern capital cities, 'regarded by some as a
cesspool of iniquity and by others as a haven of delight'. He takes us to Amsterdam
in the 1660s, 'a city entirely dedicated to making money', and then to the boulevards
and parks of Paris, about which an observer of the 1690s wrote, 'There are no
people more fond of coming together, to see and be seen.' Girouard analyses how
the development of fashionable society, the increase in trade, the growth of population,
and the widening power of the nation state influenced seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
cities, and how the Industrial Revolution affected cities of the nineteenth century.
After depicting the smoking chimneys of Manchester, the development of London
suburbs, and the New York and Chicago skyscrapers, he concludes with a description
of Los Angeles, a city that has incorporated a new vision of sprawling houses,
gardens, low buildings, and low densities, in which the conventional central area
has been reduced to unimportance. Girouard's fascinating
text, interwoven with over three hundred illustrations, is not only a significant
piece of social history but also an irresistible delight. Mark
Girouard is one of Britain's leading architectural historians. He is the author
of many successful and prize-winning books and is well known for his work on radio
and television. His previous books include Life in the English Country House,
The Victorian Country House, The Return to Camelot, Robert Smythson
and the Elizabethan Country House, Victorian Pubs, and Sweetness
and Light: The Queen Anne Movement, 1860-1900. He has lectured widely in Britain,
Australia and the United States, and was Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University
in 1975-6. |
