essay _ THE CITY IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE CITY!

Review of Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium, by Sanford Kwinter, Journal of Architectural Education, #65:1 (December 2011): 96-97

Excerpt: The City is Dead, Long Live the City! is the latent title of Sanford Kwinter’s recent collection of essays. This seductively designed, seemingly straightforward, and deceivingly undersized book is less a lament over a past urbanity, as “Requiem” would suggest, than an investigation of current and future environments.  The city as we know it is “dead” but a new kind of city is emerging, one that constantly resists recognition while at the same time dazzles with mysterious effects and unexpected relationships. This new city finds its champion in Kwinter. It’s not a particular city, nor architecture or literature that we are tracking here (even though we visit Paris and New York, hear from Koolhaas and Fuller, and read quotations by Deleuze and Foucault) but the taste of a new global urban environment. Architecture, Kwinter notes, has but one choice  . . .

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