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Author Waterhouse, Alan, author

Title Boundaries of the city : the architecture of western urbanism / Alan Waterhouse
Published Toronto, Ontario : University of Toronto, 1993

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Description 1 online resource (xxiii, 342 pages) : illustrations, maps, plans
Contents PART ONE: Elements of the Boundary Idea -- 1 Expressive Meanings, Ancient and Modern -- 2 The Narrative of Boundary Architecture -- 3 Self-Interest and Reciprocity
PART TWO: Urban Boundaries in Practice. 4 Cities in a God-Filled Landscape -- 5 Dividing the Urban Realm -- 6 Intensity, Insularity, and Communitas -- 7 The Subversion of Everyday Life -- 8 Urban Boundaries in Turmoil -- 9 The Dissolving Boundaries of Modernism -- 10 Retreat from a Magic Landscape
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
Analysis Architecture
Europe
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed April 7, 2016)
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Urbanization -- Europe -- History
Architecture -- Europe -- History.
City planning -- Europe -- History
ARCHITECTURE -- Buildings -- Public, Commercial & Industrial.
Architecture
City planning
Urbanization
Stedenbouw.
Stadsplanning.
planification urbaine -- Europe -- origines -- 20e s.
architecture -- Europe -- origines -- 20e s.
urbanisation -- Europe -- origines -- 20e s.
Europe
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 94162567
ISBN 9781442623583
1442623586