Concrete Reveries: Consciousness And The City - Softcover

Kingwell, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143013238 ISBN 13: 9780143013235

Publisher: Penguin Canada, 2009

Synopsis

In Concrete Reveries, acclaimed philosopher and cultural critic Mark Kingwell offers a thoughtful answer to Socrates’ injunction about the life worth living, using the urban experience to illustrate the dynamic between concreteness and abstraction that operates within us.Witty and authoritative, the book is an exhilarating journey through unexpected terrain.

About this title

About the Author:

Philosopher and critic Mark Kingwell is the author of more than ten books, including the national bestsellers Better Living and The World We Want. A professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, his scholarly work has appeared in many leading journals, including the Journal of Philosophy, Political Theory, and the Harvard Design Magazine. He is also a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and a regular contributor to Adbusters, the National Post, and the Globe and Mail. He has won many awards for his writing, including the National Magazine Award for both essays and columns. Classic Cocktails is based on his award-winning cocktail column, which appears in the men’s magazine Toro.

From Booklist:

Philosopher and critic Kingwell wants us to see cities whole, as massive efforts to establish order and make all that we desire possible, in short, the culmination of civilization. Beginning with high praise for much-maligned concrete, Kingwell writes about architecture and the synergy of cities with intellectual and aesthetic rigor as well as a poet’s sensibility, always returning from the esoteric to the sensuous. Anecdotal and animated, Kingwell is particularly revelatory in his discussion of thresholds between public and private spaces, interiors and exteriors, and in his explication of the interplay of “consciousness, architecture, and politics” that shapes cities. After designating New York as the “capital of the twentieth century,” Kingwell names Shanghai as the “city of tomorrow” and takes readers on a dizzying tour of that burgeoning “fantasyland of architectural grandiosity.” Quoting exuberantly from the likes of Descartes, Freud, Jane Jacobs, DeLillo, and Bellow as well as from such adventurous architects as Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaus, Zaha Hadid, and Xing Tonghe, and presenting an array of intriguing illustrations, Kingwell has built an elegant metropolis of ideas. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Canada
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0143013238
• ISBN 13: 9780143013235
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288