New York

"New York was the quintessential city of the 20th century. Its worldiness, its creativity, the multiple spikes of its skyline - the nearest architecture comes to an act of nature - became in the course of the last century an object of intense desire, not just for the disaffected but for all the world.". "This book documents its most significant works of architecture both built and projected, from the past 10 years and 10 years into the future. It is less a record of the imagination of architects and more a document that views architecture as the most permanent residue of the profound culture of a city. Unseen but always present with the multiple activities that are concentrated within the fabric of a great city are deeply rooted structures that sustain the essential ideological nature of its organisation. And beneath all the glitz and grime it must not be forgotten that New York remains the most ideological of cities created by the Enlightenment - created to form a ruthless rational order whose reality would forever be in a state of becoming.". "The essays offer the material evidence of the state of the city at the start of the new millennium. They present a continual concern with the erosion of that order with which the city was reformed at the start of the 19th century: an erosion that affects not only the shape of communities and neighbourhoods but also their political and social order. The gridding of Manhattan, that regulated playing field that allowed the city to become a dominant mercantile power, became softened by the sense and sensibility of late 19th-century civics - a cultural paternalism which enabled the wealthy to build institutions with a permanence surpassing those of Europe. By the century's end New York had both produced and attracted vast extremes of wealth and poverty, all held within the constant egalitarian order of the grid."--BOOK JACKET.