Boundaries of the city : the architecture of western urbanism
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Boundaries of the city : the architecture of western urbanism
University of Toronto Press, c1993
Available at 10 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this study Alan Waterhouse draws on anthropological, social and cultural history, literature, and philosophy to reach an understanding of the roots of Western architecture and city building. He explores the illusion that cities are constructed to impose rational order, an order articulated through urban boundaries. These boundaries, he finds, are shaped around our instinctive fears and insecurities about crime, insurrection, and the violent disruption of everyday life. At the same time, contrary instincts aspire to create a unified domain, to proclaim the interdependence of things through constructed work. Cities are shaped less by rational design than by a recurring dialectic of boundary formation.These impulses underlie the formal vocabulary of architecture and urbanism. Waterhouse follows them through the theories, ideologies, and styles that seem to govern city buildings; he finds their presence in the creation of territorial divisions, and also wherever the cityscape has been shaped by a poetic imagination.Tracing his narrative of urban boundaries from antiquity to the birth of modernism, Waterhouse discovers some stubborn legacies that bind contemporary urban design to the past. Part One explores the boundary dialectic in our regard for deities, for nature, and for one another, and then as a powerful influence on architectural invention and our ways of life. Part Two traces these themes through city building history, to show how architecture and human relatedness are subordinated by boundary formation in the cycles of urbanization."
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