Main entry:

Waterhouse, Alan.

Title & Author:

Boundaries of the city : the architecture of western urbanism / Alan Waterhouse.

Publication:

Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Description:

xxiii, 342 pages : illustrations, maps, plans ; 28 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
pt. 1. Elements of the Boundary Idea. 1. Expressive Meanings, Ancient and Modern. The Source of Urban Boundaries. Poetry and Construction. Urbanism and Dialectics. The Primary Structures of Urbanism. Imagining Unity: Connecting to History the Dissolution of Space. Expressive Meaning and the Arrangement of Urban Space. 2. The Narrative of Boundary Architecture. The Dialectical Archetype. Archetypal Form and Archetypal Content. Architecture and Recurrence. Architectural Narrative. Architectural Discourse and Expressive Meaning. Foreground Moves to Background. 3. Self-Interest and Reciprocity. The Urbanism of Self-Interest. The Mechanical City. The Methodological Inversion. Family Contradictions -- pt. 2. Urban Boundaries in Practice. 4. Cities in a God-Filled Landscape.
Also issued online.

Summary:

"In this study Alan Waterhouse draws on anthropology, 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 building; 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."--Jacket.

ISBN:

0802005381
9780802005380

Subject:

City planning Europe History.
Architecture Europe History.
Urbanization Europe History.
Urbanisme Europe Histoire.
Architecture Europe Histoire.
Urbanisation Europe Histoire.
Architecture.
City planning.
Urbanization.
Stedenbouw.
Stadsplanning.
planification urbaine Europe origines 20e s.
architecture Europe origines 20e s.
urbanisation Europe origines 20e s.
Europe.

Form/genre:

History.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 86375
Call No.: ID:93-B1863
Status: Available