Projecting Urbanity: Architecture for and against the City
Existing histories of modern architecture typically give their highest praise to private houses and their most severe condemnation to architect-authored urban plans, often neglecting the built works that are no smaller than a single building and possibly as large as an urban block, the middle or institutional scale, where culturally significant urban transformation actually takes place.
Urban architecture is a timely topic as today cities worldwide are suffering accelerated urbanisation, which is often dehumanising and destructive, especially to the unbuilt environment, airs, waters and soils. The middle or institutional scale is shown to activate and actualise latent potentials for cultural experience and environmental intelligence, allowing the city to surprise itself and delight in its discoveries.
In Projecting Urbanity, David Leatherbarrow, via author-architect texts by his former doctorate students, lays out the basis for a revision of modern architecture’s contribution to cities and their culture. Presenting a series of texts featuring buildings or their parts of various scales – from the construction detail, to the room or garden, to ensembles within a neighborhood – the contributors introduce concepts for contemporary and future urban architecture, together with richly indicative examples from the past several decades.
While architecture cannot “solve” today’s urban problems, it certainly has a role to play in their productive transformation, articulating opportunities for life and culture that are more humane, less wasteful, and more beautiful.
David Leatherbarrow is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Philadelphia. Previously he taught theory and design at the University of Cambridge and the Polytechnic of Central London. He has lectured throughout the world and has held guest professorships in Britain, Denmark and China at Southeast University. Questions of how architecture appears, how architecture is perceived, and how topography and architecture shape one another orient his research. He is the recipient of the 2020 Topaz Medallion, the highest award given by the AIA and ASCA for excellence in architectural education.
