[audiobook] kleine Maedchen (German Edition) by Klaus H. Carl at Arts-Photography

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.