The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments

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Summary: Language and format
Review: The book is heavily indebted to French literary work of the 1960s...and this tends to overload its language in the direction of ponderousness...and a certain detachment from English....polysyllability was made for it...and a curiosity is that it was set up in Cochin and proofread apparently by a tone-deaf spellcheck program...so that 'bear' becomes 'bare,' and 'monastery' is transmuted into 'monestery...etc. It points to the enormous gap between academese and ordinary speech...which is a pity, because the book is nonetheless worth reading...and takes in a broad swathe of thought about the visible aspects of city and the ways in which this is transmuted and thinned-out in modern and post-modern decades. The distinction between 'memory' (i.e. a living tradition of sense and sensibility about space and its demarcations) and 'history' (a dead sense of record and mechanical or miscellaneous assembly) is grounded in the thought of Walter Benjamin...and rooted in the perceptual moralities of John Ruskin and Patrick Geddes. The book would only have been more useful had its polysyllables been (literally) translated into a prose that ebwhite or jamesthurber would have approved.

Rating:
Summary: regardless language and format...
Review: this is an excellent text. in my opinion indebted to historical analysis. the author gives great examples of cases and interrelations that city building has had during the years. from the neoclasical revival of greece under Othon's kingdom to the work of rossi. very influenced by the work of Benjamin and the "dialectics of seeing" the text is thought provoking, and that is in a critical way of how we experience the urban environment today. However, and again in my opinion, it is within the conclusion that the text fails to provide some answers to its proposed considerations on contemporary technology.