The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and The Ancient World

Rating:
Summary: overlooked topic offering unexpected insights
Review: Rykwert succeeds magnificently with this work, an older and more historically focused effort than his brilliant The Seduction of Place: The Future and Future of Cities. The writing is clear and accessible, but reaches far into historical annals, educating the reader and, more importantly, touching on the role that societies have played in the founding, structuring and continued sanctifying of cities. His focus is Roman, buttressed with Etruscan and Greek insights drawn from lore and archeology, but he also offers a broader panorama in his closing chapters. Rykwert writes with an erudition that seems boundless. Urbanists, archeologists, village-people and philosophers alike will appreciate his thought on a subject that ought not to be overlooked in our mad commuting and hectic urbanism.

Rating:
Summary: overlooked topic offering unexpected insights
Review: Rykwert succeeds magnificently with this work, an older and more historically focused effort than his brilliant The Seduction of Place: The Future and Future of Cities. The writing is clear and accessible, but reaches far into historical annals, educating the reader and, more importantly, touching on the role that societies have played in the founding, structuring and continued sanctifying of cities. His focus is Roman, buttressed with Etruscan and Greek insights drawn from lore and archeology, but he also offers a broader panorama in his closing chapters. Rykwert writes with an erudition that seems boundless. Urbanists, archeologists, village-people and philosophers alike will appreciate his thought on a subject that ought not to be overlooked in our mad commuting and hectic urbanism.

Rating:
Summary: Not optional reading
Review: This is a book more for architects than it is for classicists although it will enrich anyone who reads it. Rykwert is a scholar of the first rank, and it is the mark of a superior scholar to write in such a way as to cull the most arcane information from another field and trim, dry, boil, knead and package it for easy swallowing without sacrificing any of the wisdon-enhancing ingredients. Other books dealing with the same theme have preceded Rykwert's own book. F.W Jackson Knight's and Fustel de Coulanges' are exemplary for their intensity of imagination and obliquity of perspective. And like its predecessors, Rykwert's book takes you on a brief, but a grand tour of the ancient world. That is to say, it shows you just what was so grand about the ancient world and the ancient mind's response to the cosmos in its orientation with regard to "worlding". The book deals with the ancient practice, especially Roman, of founding a city. Rykwert shows you in plain language the profundity and density of religious and mythopoetic factors that used to go into the act of founding a city. But, this book is not about something that once was. It is about that which always IS in Architecture. The Roman poet Sallust said of myths, "these things never happened, but are always." This is what Rykwert gets at in describing the actual mechanisms and the machines that appear as gods, herms, gates, etc, in ancient Mediterranean constructions of the world. World: Mundus, in Latin. The chthonic gateway to the underworld, the big gaping vaginal hole in the middle of the site where the town is to be erected. The final chapter discusses the symbolic parallels found in other traditions.
This book is not optional reading for those who would pretend to practice architecture, or for those who want to understand the origin/destiny of the relationship between "art" and "religion", between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Western culture. I recommend Camille Paglia's for a richer and wider and literary understanding of the implication of Rykwert's thesis as it applies to the whole cultural trajectory of the Occident's history. By the way, the sales rank of this book, and that after 25 years, no architect (practitioner, student, consumer) has bothered to write a review of this indispensible work only further fan my misgivings concerning the two thing I know about my own profession: intellectual vapidity of the license wielding practitioners and the miasmic cabalism of the academics.

Rating:
Summary: Ethnocentric and Anti-Anthropological
Review: This is an ethnocentric view of the role of religion in ancient cities. The author assumes that all cities were the same and that notions from the western tradition apply to all ancient cities. The use of the term "anthropology" in the title is ironic; his approach is not at all anthropological (anthropology works to transcend ethnocentric ideas and to document cultural variation, not ignore it). In fact, the title shows the author's ignorance of the discipline of anthropology. He employs an archaic definition, common among nineteenth-century classicists, that "anthropology" means "religion and ritual." So the title of this book really means, "the religion of urban form."

The comparative method is the hallmark of anthropology. Rykwert does make cross-cultural comparisons, but in a random, non-anthropological fashion. Instead of making controlled comparisons using a clear problem-orientation, he throws in seemingly-random examples from vastly different cultures without any theoretical justification for the particular comparison. This may be entertaining, and even illuminating in a few cases, but it is NOT anthropological, and it does not at all resemble the comparative approach of anthropology.

Rykwert makes a number of anti-anthropological statements; here are some examples: (1) "All the great civilizations practice it" (referring to rectilineal planning), page 26. This is incorrect in that rectilineal planning is NOT particularly common in ancient civilizations, and it is anti-anthropological in assuming that some civilizations are "greater" than others. (2) Rituals done at the founding of a town "must have roots in the biological structure of man" (page 194). This is nonsense, unless the author is using the trivial notion that all behavior, at some level, has roots in our biological nature.

I apologize for the vitriolics, but as an anthropologist I find the use of the term "anthropology" in this book title inaccurate and insulting.

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