Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World [Audiobook]

B0CQZ2TQ81 M4B@64 kbps Landscape designer and historian Wade Graham follows the acclaimed American Eden with a lively, accessible cultural history of modern citiesfrom suburbs, downtown districts, and exurban sprawl, to shopping malls and "sustainable" developmentsseen through the lens of planning, design, and the architects and movements behind them. Dream Cities explores our cities in a new wayas expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose imagined cities became the blueprints for the world we live in. From the nineteenth century to today, what began as visionary conceptssometimes utopian, sometimes outlandish, always controversialwere gradually adopted and constructed on a massive scale in cities around the world, from Dubai to Ulan Bator to London to Los Angeles. Wade Graham uses the lives of the pivotal dreamers behind these concepts, as well as their acolytes and antagonists, to deconstruct our urban landscapesthe houses, towers, civic centers, condominiums, shopping malls, boulevards, highways, and spaces in betweenexposing the ideals and ideas embodied in each. From the baroque fantasy villages of Bertram Goodhue to the superblocks of Le Corbusier's Radiant City to the pseudo-agrarian dispersal of Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, our upscale leafy suburbs, downtown skyscraper districts, infotainment-driven shopping malls, and "sustainable" eco-developments are seen as never before. In this book, Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant, obsessed, and sometimes megalomaniacal designers, revealing the foundations of today's varied municipalities. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern urban world.