Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City - Hardcover

Kingwell, Mark

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70 ratings by Goodreads

9780670037803: Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067003780X ISBN 13: 9780670037803

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2008

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An analysis of the relationship between urbanism and personal identity evaluates the ways in which people are shaped by their spaces and vice versa, in an account that explores such topics as the disparities between structural interiors and exteriors, the moral obligations of citizens, and the role of a city's atmosphere in molding its residents' beliefs. 10,000 first printing.

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About the Author:

Mark Kingwell is a philosopher and critic who is currently professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of ten books, including Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness from Plato to Prozac and Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams. He is a contributing editor for Harper�’s Magazine and he has written for The New York Times Magazine, Adbusters, Forbes, and Utne Reader.

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

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