The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities

by Richard Sennett

"Visionary, often brilliant." ― Los Angeles Times From the assembly halls of Athens to the Turkish baths of New York's Lower East Side, from eighteenth-century English gardens to the housing projects of Harlem―a study of the physical fabric of the city as a mirror of Western society and culture.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Architecture, Cities, Urbanism, Urban, History

284 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Richard Sennett has explored how individuals and groups make social and cultural sense of material facts -- about the cities in which they live and about the labour they do. He focuses on how people can become competent interpreters of their own experience, despite the obstacles society may put in their way. His research entails ethnography, history, and social theory. As a social analyst, Mr. Sennett continues the pragmatist tradition begun by William James and John Dewey.

His first book, The Uses of Disorder, [1970] looked at how personal identity takes form in the modern city. He then studied how working-class identities are shaped in modern society, in The Hidden Injuries of Class, written with Jonathan Cobb. [1972] A study of the public realm of cities, The Fall of Public Man, appeared in 1977; at the end of this decade of writing, Mr. Sennett sought to account the philosophic implications of this work in Authority [1980].

At this point he took a break from sociology, composing three novels: The Frog who Dared to Croak [1982], An Evening of Brahms [1984] and Palais Royal [1987]. He then returned to urban studies with two books, The Conscience of the Eye, [1990], a work focusing on urban design, and Flesh and Stone [1992], a general historical study of how bodily experience has been shaped by the evolution of cities.

In the mid 1990s, as the work-world of modern capitalism began to alter quickly and radically, Mr. Sennett began a project charting its personal consequences for workers, a project which has carried him up to the present day. The first of these studies, The Corrosion of Character, [1998] is an ethnographic account of how middle-level employees make sense of the “new economy.” The second in the series, Respect in a World of Inequality, [2002} charts the effects of new ways of working on the welfare state; a third, The Culture of the New Capitalism, [2006] provides an over-view of change. Most recently, Mr. Sennett has explored more positive aspects of labor in The Craftsman [2008], and in Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation [2012].

Reviews

[Merve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Sennett sosyal bilimler dünyasının en çok bilinen düşünürlerinden biridir. Kitaplarını okurken fark edersiniz ki birden, onun anlattığı her şeye her söylemine katılmasanız bile,hatta onun yanlış ya da eksik bulduğunuz fikirleri olsa bile okumadan edemezsiniz. Akademik bir dili esnek halde kullanan ama yine de alanının terimlerine değindiği için herkesçe sevilebilecek bir düşünür değil. Konuya ilgi duyan, sosyal bilimlerle ilgili eğitim alan ya da bu alanlara yatkınlığı olan insanların daha çok ilgisini çeker muhtemelen. Tanışmadıysanız aslında güzel bir başlangıç olabilir Richard Sennett. Özellikle Yabancı adlı kitabı da iyi bi başlangıç olabilir. İnce kolay anlaşılır ama derinlikli. Bu da bir küçük not olarak ilişsin buraya (:
Gözün Vicdanı aslında iyi seçilmiş bir başlık. Görmenin, görmek istediğinin yaklaşımı kentsel mekanların kuruluşuna nasıl etki ettiğini çevremizdeki doğa ve insan düşmanı yapılaşmalardan da iyi anlayabiliriz. Bu kitapta aslında yaşamlar kadar kentlerin de nasıl iç ve dış olarak ayrıştırıldığını, kentlerin kişidışı niteliklerle yeniden oluşturulduğunu toplumlarımızın birbirlerine yabancı gördüklerine duydukları açılma korkusunu kentsel yapılarla nasıl yeniden inşa ettiğini anlatıyor. Ben okurken keyif aldım. Kilise gibi yapılardan modern kent mimarisine kadar uzanan bir yelpazesi var. Sevdiğim bir yazar olmasına rağmen yine de eserlerinde toplumsal cinsiyete duyarlı bir bakış açısına da sahip olmasını da isterdim. Ufak ufak değinmesi o konuyu çok da irdelediği anlamına gelmez. Kamusal İnsanın Çöküşü kitabında da bu eksiklik çok sık karşınıza çıkıyordu bu kitapta da öyle. Okuduğum bir çok erkek düşünürün eserinde bu durum var ne yazık ki. Cinsiyetli bir dünyada yaşıyor olmanın ve hayatın her alanına yayılmış cinsiyetlilendirilmiş bir toplumu çok evrensel terimlerle cinsiyet körü ya da cinsiyet konusunu çok az dikkate alarak araştırma yapmaları hemen birçoğunun eksikliği bana kalırsa okuduğum kadarıyla.
Yine de kentlerin oluşturulmasına yönelik bakış açınızı etkileyebilecek bir güce sahip Sennett’in kitabı. Sokakta yürürken ya da yürümeye çalışırken etrafınızın nasıl düzenlendiğine bir bakın. Hareket özgürlüğünüze nasıl ideolojik bir müdahale edildiğini ve toplumların bireylerin kitlesel olarak bir araya gelebilmelerinin önünün nasıl kesildiğini göreceksiniz. Kişiyi dışarda bırakan, kişiliksiz, duygusallıktan arındırılmış, nötr ve sizi diğer insanlarla aynı kentsel mekanda nasıl iyice yabancılaştıran mekansal tasarımlara maruz kaldığınızı daha net görebiliyorsunuz böylece. Sadece kentler dönüştürülmüyor. Estetik duygudan yoksun, insanları birbirinden görünmez duvarlar, kesişen ve dar sokaklarla ayıran bir kent planı doğayı da öldürüyor. İnsani bir yaşam çevresi oluşturma ihtimalini de. Bir filmde de geçtiği gibi etrafımızda her bir alana dikilen beton binalar ve gökdelenler bu kentin “mezar taşları”dır.
Kitapla ilgili son söz olarak şunu söyleyebilirim düşünürün bahsettiği birçok yapıların internetten görsellerine bakarak daha iyi anlaşılabilir. Birçok yapı ismi geçiyor kitapta bu durum kitaba bi parça yabancı kalmaya sebep olabilir.

[Sagely · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Sennett's CoE for a DMin class. I found this text both staggering in scope and invigorating to read. I hope to come back and reread this (as well as the other volumes in Sennett's series).

Below find my "working outline of the text.

Introduction The Conscience of the Eye
In ancient Greece, the eye saw the complexities of life, politics, erotics, ethics built into the architecture and design of the city. Today this is not only not the case, but the very practice is hard to imagine. We live after the world has been divided between inner subjectivity (home of meaning) and outer brute physicality—a realm not of instruction but of fear of being exposed within the crowd. We lack an ancient centeredness that came from the outside—the city—as much as it did the inside.

Pt 1 Interior Shadows
Ch 1 The Refuge
Dislocation, wandering, exposure were understood to be part of early Christian experience. Augustine, following the sack of Rome, transformed this into the conviction that the Christian soul and the Christian eye is restless, seeking an eternal city, not at home in the physical one. The physical, nevertheless, can cast a shadow that leads us, through indirection, to the church.

Two centuries later St Isidore engineered Augustine’s vision in the design of the city. The guiding conviction was that sacred and secular spaces must be different—discontinuity. Churches were meticulously designed and built; the rest of the city was haphazard chaos. “A center visible became immense and solid; a center of clarity, in contrast to the mess of worldliness” (13).

As one saw more clearly, one came under the protection of God. The realm around the church was demarcated as a zone of immunity, a realm of compassion absent in the market town. The “inside,” marked by the church, is fiercely delineated from the chaos outside.

In the 19th century, the space of compassion and clarity migrated to the home (cf. John Ruskin)—“‘home’ became the secular version of spiritual refuge” (21)—though this shelter often could not live up to its billing. Home was to be the place of truth, personal and social (cf. Saint- Simon), of Gemeinschaft and psychological development. But by withdrawing “inside,” people became subject to further division and isolation, not into compassion or enlightenment (cf. railroad apartments). One paid for protection from exposure with isolation.

A 19th century photo shows New York as a space of legibility, clarity—of authority, which preserves persons from interacting with space. See the Rockefeller Center, which provides a towering but inhospitable space of comfort, a reassurance of “what matters for those within its orbit” (36). Authority has become a space of legibility and precision. “The sanctuary of the Christian city has been reduced to a sense of comfort in well-designed places where other people do not intrude” (37).

Ch 2 The Neutral City
The Protestant interior spiritual quest prefers a neutral exterior to do its work—something like an imagined, vacuous New World. In contrast medieval churches marking God’s locus in exterior space, puritanical Protestants did not see God outside but solely within. The “impersonality, coldness, and emptiness” of the contemporary city provide a certain reassurance that exteriors are purely instrumental realities.

One of oldest inscriptions for town is an Egyptian hierograph comprising a cross within a circle. The circle “suggests enclosure”; the cross, an elementary grid. The grid became an organizing imaginary for urban spaces. In America, an imagined or enacted grid became a “weapon to be used against environmental character” (52), neutralizing the space of the city—an exercise of power in puritanical bad conscience. The grid became “a space for economic competition, to be played upon like a chessboard” (55) and a excuse for evil—“the very practice of neutrality permits this divorce between intention and act” (61), in the world but not of it. In the 20th century, the grid was employed vertically in the imagination of skyscrapers.

As Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle” intimates, there is a price to be paid for “gaining control through acting neutrally” (64). In imagined neutral space, the self lays low for fear of exposure, of becoming wrongly. The result? Enervation within the sheltered circle. Compare the bar at the Pierre Hotel, the family bars in Harlem, and the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village—where does life happen?

Pt 2 The Eye Searches for Unity
Ch 3 The Open Window of the Eighteenth Century
In the late 18th century, immersion in nature became a route to honest interiority (cf. Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker). Opening a window, manufacturing a space for exposure to the natural world (through devices like the haw-haw) offered a manufactured transparency to the interior of the self, a path to wholeness.

A tension between wholeness and difference is evident in verbal opposition of culture and civilization. Civilization came to indicate “the virtues of a certain kind of disguise” (79), the politenesses of indirection, a workaround for nature. This mask disgusted many Enlightenment thinkers; instead they idealized the honnête homme, the man of solidity and forthrightness. This person is cultured, cultivated, strengthened by contrivance, perfecting (human) nature (viz., through “absorbing art, literature, and thinking of past and present,” having “seen something of the world” [84]). The self grows stronger, more cultured, by partaking of difference, through conversation.

The urban street, however, is not nature—it was “horse dung and slops from
houses” (89), prone to moral degradation. Enlightenment urban planners sought to remedy this disorder situation by creating unifying town squares. Some, Jacques-Ange Gabriel’s the Place de la Concorde, attempted to bring unifying order to the special chaos of the city, and failed as the city continued to adapt. Others, like John Wood the Younger’s King’s Circus, sought to unify by bridging the urban and the pastoral through avenues (cf. Burnham’s Grant Park in Chicago). These bridges merely succeeded in dispersing difference.

Ch 4 The Unexpected Consequences of Visual Unity
The medieval Christian city struggled to relate the unity of faith with the diversity of humanity; the Enlightenment urban planner struggled to reconcile the good of nature with the mob. We, too, “have trouble understanding the experience of difference as a positive human value” (97). This is also true for urban planners and architects. We have inherited the Enlightenment value of wholeness, which, ironically, turns buildings themselves into inhumane shrines.

Enlightenment urban planners held the belief that when strangers meet, one could “enter, if only for a few moments, into the thoughts, needs, and desires” of the other “no matter how different that person was” (99). The imagination exercises our own memories and experiences in an act of sympathy. This was the path of connection and pro-social action. Flashes of sympathy could be briefly evoked (manipulated) by sudden contrasts and confrontations with the “picturesque” (cf. Wuthering Heights)—shock encounters with the sublime.

In 1941 Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture sought to bring time together with space in the construction of (sublime) unities (cf. Einstein). Glass as an architectural material enables this seeing through, seeing whole of space and time, the inside and the outside (cf. Gropius & Meyer’s Administrative Office-Building in Köln). Spaces constructed by Mies van der Rohe and others visibly invited a progression of movement. But this very unifying quality of building in glass “has given the modern architectural structure a life of its own” (106) —an anti-social, inhumane life demanding preservation. Glass architecture has freed building to an inhuman scale, and dissociated visibility and exposure, stymying sympathy, producing isolation. Mies’ Farnsworth House in Plano, IL, could serve as an icon of this reality.

“Christian belief in clarity and precision as divine has reappeared in a secular form, as the cult of the perfect object” (114). Rather than the “hot arousal” of sublime artifacts in 18th- century gardens, these 20th-century buildings are “aloof, cool, ... majestically calm” (114). They are to be preserved from use. Like the 19th-century Romantics, we discover that unity can bring isolation and withdrawal. In the end, sympathy is outlawed by wholeness.

Pt 3 The Humane City
Ch 5 Exposure
Baudelaire valued walking through Paris; the jostling and confrontation drew him out of himself. Sennett walks through New York City down Third Avenue, narrating the abrupt discontinuities between the junkies of Washington Square, middle-aged and middle class women of Gramercy Park, and so forth. Along the way he revises the University of Chicago urbanists’ thesis on the city’s density and power of stimulation; he sees “difference from and indifference to others” as a “related, unhappy pair” in his ethnographic meandering. A deadening of attention to difference and complexity flags modern spiritual illness in the city. If Isidore “‘conscience of the eye’ sought ... how to represent his values” in stone, Sennet raises the “difficulty of arousing conscience through visual experience” (132).

Next, a walk with Hannah Arendt. In post-war exile in the States, Arendt developed a politics of exile: “to transcend dreams of home, Gemeinschaft, or religious destiny” in order for exiles to “invent the conditions of their own and common lives” (134). This is a turn away from interiority, to live here and now. Fear of exposure is a “lack of the will to live in the
world” (135); it must be tamed for the sake of human being, “our nature expressed as an active verb” (136). For Arendt, the impersonality of the city positively necessitates the work of creating shared space with strangers as universals, not as special cases. However this “anti-humanist” solidarity precludes open, personal understanding with the other.

Finally, Sennett walks through reading James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” Baldwin’s essay places the contentious early-1960s dialogue around race in a new key. Sennett highlights the art of misdirection, built-up-and-frustrated expectations, incompleteness, and non- linear narrativity in the essay. These moves compel the reader to question who the impersonalities of the text really are, moments of sympathy, in which a person becomes “life a foreigner to him or herself, by doing things or entering into feelings that do not fit the familiar framework of identity” (148). This is a different kind of turn outward.

Ch 6 Streets Full of Life
How can the street work like Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” moving us to discovery? New inventions, new techniques can displace assumptions, opening us to discover “facts or ideas that don’t fit” (151), to discover street life. Street life needs the “inventions” that supplies structure and intention.

Late-16th-century Pope Sixtus V re-invented Rome as a space of holy discovery through the construction of (pagan) obelisks. These obelisks invited perspective, and were arranged to provoke continuous movement to holy sites. Perspectival focalization directs attention, while multiple perspective points keep the eye dislocated, incomplete, restless (cf. Serlio’s Tragic Scene), sot that one does not possessively feel “I see the world” but that “the world is being seen” (156). This kind of seeing draws one into space outside oneself.

Sennet narrates the failures (Union Square) and unforeseen successes (Stuyvesant Town) of urban design to move people into the problematic space of exposure and interaction along 14th St in Manhattan. Repeating the obelisks of Rome fails in Union Square. Rather, different times require different means. The east end of 14th Street provokes movement and dislocation through disrupted linear sequence, “overlayed differences” (168) of class, race, historical experience. This is hard to plan for. It requires time (history).

Ch 7 Places Full of Time
Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin attacked the experience of time in the city, replacing Paris’ medieval quarter with mechanistic, repeatable X-shaped towers. This was a forerunner of the common grade-flat-and-build version of urban development. Both negate history in the name of artistic creation, the need for a blank canvas. It places us in a continuous now. In contrast, Le Corbusier’s traveling companion, painter Fernand Léger, provides images of the effects of time on even machines: wear and tear. This is not passing into nostalgia, but a “form given to time in space” (176).

The advent of the town clock reorganized space during the Renaissance. Time must be legible, so the buildup of market squares was cleared away and façades trimmed. Clock-time cleared a space for power and control, grid-space. Conversely, the irruption of the cannon disorganized time. The lengthy siege was burst apart by death vaulting over the city walls and raining from the sky. Time was re-invented during the Renaissance as emptiness and as chaos, both controlled and uncontrollable. Fortune’s clock-like wheel became an emblem for this razing and leveling of time. Under the spinning hand of Fortune, we surrender to living and building provisionally.

“In using and fragmenting and pasting together forms, the maker of them is engaged in spiritual struggle ... against the human power to annihilate through regulatory order; but if and when one wins this struggle, a person makes things of no permanent value, no ultimate worth, only present meaning” (190). This is an entry into narrative space. Narrative space opens space to time. Good narratives begin in media res, yet they have beginning (not just origins), “circumstance [which] include a sense of loss” (194, cf. Said), a displacement. To create this in urban design requires a softening, a porosity of boundaries (material and social) that yet provide resistance (e.g., verbal conflict). This resistance provides recognition scenes, which “organizes confrontation among previous separated elements” (198) and produces depth of awareness of self and other.

Pt 4 The Art of Exposure
Ch 8 Making Exposed Things
The neutral city can call forth the imposition of the self, an “I am here,” “I made this” (cf. graffiti). This imposition of the self through art can focus either on the “I” who makes or the uncertain effects rendered by manipulation of materials (“listening with a third ear” [208]). “There is a virtue to making something as an exposed, uncertain ‘it’ rather than a declarative
‘I’” (208). Uncertainty, exposure, discovery results from focusing on concrete materials (e.g., the cancer researcher looking for cells that “shouldn’t” be there). Compare Parisian stencil graffiti to NYC’s tagging. John Dewey theorizes that struggle with a resistant environment or medium draws the artist’s attention to the materials—“the artist begins to ‘participate’ in his or her materials: ‘when the participation comes after a phase of disruption and conflict” (212). Art as reconciliation.

As the art of Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol, and Richard Avedon demonstrate, even the “neutralizing” grid can become an invitation to depth and engagement by highlighting to it as a material of manipulation. By repetition or simultaneity, the viewer’s assumed knowledge is destabilized, and the viewer is moved to awareness of mutation and development—even within the grid. This is what late-Enlightenment urbanist Antoine Quatremère de Quincy theorized as “‘variations’ around a ‘nucleus’” that made up an architectural type (218). Such mutation subverts the “acts of placement, resolution, definition” and opens the way for “the eye [to explore] the ambiguous and [encounter] the unexpected” (219) (Cf. the poetics of Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge” & Ashbery’s “As We Know” and “Litany”). Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum is a flagship example of the of such a decontextualizing, displacing, and arousing space.

The effect of this decontextualizing, displacing design are less deconstructive than humane, engagement rather than enragement. The Enlightenment view of sympathy as imagining sameness with an other is echoed but transformed by Simone Weil. She saw difference as driving space between people, not inviting bridges. Weil instead calls for a rootedness grown from an awareness of one’s limits, “of insufficiency in oneself” (229). This insufficiency causes us to send out shoots toward others whom we need to trust, a trust whose signs are “only to be found in shared moments” (230, emphasis mine). Weil shows another way of experiencing uncertainty —not through displacement but by surrender to silence. Weil’s sympathetic modality of uncertainty is exemplified in the silent loungers of the Lower East Side, a leisurely contemplation of self and other. Paired with empathy—“the sharing of a common view” despite the fact that “though we use the same words, we cannot say we are speaking of the same things” (Aristotle, Politics, in Sennet 234)—these two modalities of uncertainty make up an urban visual conscience (Regrading empathy, cf. the documentary on white lightning).

Ch 9 Centering Oneself
How might a more balanced, calm Apollonian temperament deal with “uncertainty, displacement, and the loss of control” (239)? We strive for sophrosyne—taken as “centeredness”—while being exposed to all the differences of the street. In the Apollo cult, “healing and making were related”: “Those under Apollo’s sign are free to create because they have tamed their own [Dionysian] self-absorption” (240). Apollo’s built body, the perfection of beauty, provides a contrast to the imperfections and resistance of ordinary life as well as an invitation to accept these imperfections in order to continue making. “The god’s body stages a bitter confrontation of the ideal and the actual” (cf. Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”), which reveals our limits but also summons us to find balance in production.

Apollo’s vision drives us away from an Augustinian turn to the interior; beauty and balance both must be find through exposure. The chapel designed by Mark Rothko in Houston to display his art directs the eye outward, to find a center “as it contemplates things,” by “sensory engagement,” here in Rothko’s “icon of outer emptiness, the grid” (247). This turning outward, as in the street, involves a “renunciation of certain impulses to wholeness and completion in oneself” (248). A humane culture rejects the “cathartic event, the moment of fulfillment” (248).

Sennett ends with a reflection on George Balanchine’s two renditions of Stravinsky’s ballet Apollon Musagète. The original 1928 version was a masterpiece—“a form so coherent and controlled that it stood as a rebuke to the disorganizing energies of the art of its time” (249). But in the 1979 revival Balanchine radically altered the production. Many felt this a broken promise, a broken faith. Sennett comments, “provoking instead” (250). The revival modulates the classical positions into “questions marks of bodily movement ... rather than strokes of the ineluctable consummating the graven; displacement is built into the forms, which are at the same time coherent” (252). This is humane knowledge of things, calm but not permanence. This is what the city needs to invite ethical vision.

[cassady · Rating 4 out of 5]

wish i had read this in a shorter time frame but alas....
was sort of disconnected from the text by the end. but in my more immersive reading sessions, every sentence was so deeply interesting, my copy has underlines galore.

city grid patterns are an attempt at enforcement of a particular moral order : "the American individual is a passive person, and monotonous space is what a society of passive individuals builds for itself. A bland environment assures people that nothing disturbing or demanding is happening 'out there.' You build neutrality in order to legitimate withdrawal."

REJECT WHOLENESS

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I'd written this immediately after I finished this instead of a couple weeks later, because this book is thick with abstract theory. The thesis, in essence, is that aesthetics of a city matter and speak to its vitality. Bullet points in lieu of transitions:

-The grid pattern of streets favored in the Midwest is a tyrannical form of city planning that holds no respect to natural landscape. "Our vision of the city will go wherever we please!" I grew up and lived in a series of gridded streets for 27 years, and now that I live in a city whose riverine borders form the shape of a mountainous slice of pizza, my navigation is all screwed up. So, while the choke points of bridges and tunnels dictate my inability to zig-zag my way from Homestead to Lawrenceville, it does impart a sense of place that I don't get in, say, Minneapolis. A grid seeks to impart the sense that each place is interchangeable, which makes it a lot harder to read a map and divine a commercial center (East Liberty, Pittsburgh being an obvious hub of streets versus Uptown, Minneapolis being an anonymous
This is another stop on my quest to define "place" and why it matters. Richard Sennett is way above my head, tying architecture to social history to battles within the church to life on the street to a walk through lower Manhattan to sightlines in art. I think it's important, even though I can't grasp all his references. Best read with liberal use of Google image search.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this so much, I decided to read it again...a few years later (and a few years ago). Sennett presents a amazingly tactile reading of "The City" based on numerous social, architectural, and spatial aspects. His writing is very nuanced in this regard - especially where he outlines his long walk through the island, showing off his "city reading" skills as my friend Sean would have it. Highly recommend!

[Gökçek Özdaş · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antik çağdan başlayarak, insanın kutsal alanlarının nasıl evrildiğini ve bunun üzerinden kentin ve insanın mahrem alanlarının nasıl şekillenerek günümüze geldiğini anlatıyor. Öncelikle plancılar olmak üzere, mimarlar ve peyzaj mimarlarına ısrarla önerilir.

[Simon Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

i resist historical narrativisation where an author draws on the "canon" putting exemplar characters in conversation to explain the larger processes of history. (something about how this negates the "long duree" and the vulgarity of everyday architecture) especially in the context of architecture/urban planning/design where language is often unable to access the inticacies of form and the way that form affects us in ways that precede language. However, sennet's humanist-language view that desires "exposure" "arousal" and conflict with the other as antidotes to the lifelessness of the modern city deeply resonates with me and my feeling of deep alienation. Also reading this book at a time when i am radically reconsidering my relationship with others and my own internalised fear of conflict.

My main question is can social life be designed? i already had a hunch for his ideas that buildings should not be "transcendentally self referential" (individual statements of ego) and also to create individual buildings that can embody many different programs. (reflecting here on an experience in japan every building can be a business, residential and also 19th century office buildings such as the nicholas building in melbourne or those of louis sullivan being endlessly repurposeable). I think many thinkers who work in the historical mode i described at the start dont to deal with the true geometric physicality that architecture demands from the designer. Life is cultural and formal.

This book was an amazing read I think it's true value lies in beginning to articulate a consciousness to architecture that is sorely lacking in todays practice. It feels like an attempt to deal with the fact that we are constantly recreating the world and could just as easily make it differently.

[Noam · Rating 5 out of 5]

If storytellers were architects, what kind of cities would they build?
What kind of cities would we be reading during our neighborhood walks?

Can we plan for meaningful memories? Do we need surprises in our public spaces? In what way can our building materials serve the opposite they were meant to? Is there any value in a carefully designed environment without a journey there?

This book covers so many aspects of planning, art, and design- from the grid and mechanical act of planning, all the way to education, poetry and the effect our built environment has on our character.

A thought-provoking read with practical takeaways for designing our surroundings in a way that stimulates life.

[dv · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scritto nel 1990, è un buon pendant a Il declino dell'uomo pubblico nella misura in cui parla di città facendo perno sull'opposizione dentro/fuori. Il percorso è coinvolgente e non manca di chiamare in causa autori anche non prevedibili in questo contesto (per esempio Hannah Arendt).

[dantelk]

ben bu kitaptan fazla birsey anlayabilecek birikime sahip degilmisim. :) kitap bitmek bilmeyince araya baska yan kitap aldim ki okumayi komple birakmayayim ahahah. ama sorun bende, belki 10 sene sonra falan bir daha okursam farkli olur.

yildiz veremem. :p

[Charlotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mandatory literature for a philosophy course. Professor calls it idiosyncratic, I'm leaning towards unfounded. Too concrete for philosophy yet too vague to be of true value for science.

[Daniel]

Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2022 Task #9: Read the book that’s been on your TBR the longest - DID NOT FINISH - will need to move on to next on list.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sennett conveys through the medium of city planning and architecture compelling evidence of how our deepest attitudes are conditioned by patterns. In analytical psychology there is a parallel of this structure which is evidenced by patterns in mythology and stories. In history and art similarly, the patterns of golden age, bronze, iron and decay reveal fundamental patterns.

What this book has to offer is a keen insight into fundamental structures of cognition and perception that escape ordinary awareness. The take away is not a professional view of city planning only, but a source of reflection for anyone interested in how the creative process works, and how the environment is the quintessential container for collaborative creative work.

The exposition of Sennett throws light on urban problems and the fundamental non sustainable quality of our forms of occupation of space, whereby nature is simply rolled over (human nature included.) The larger implication is that whenever the inner organizing structure of a collaborative dwelling -- be it a company, an organization or city-- is not recognized, the ensuing growth will rapidly develop in a cancer, or undifferentiated growth with no possibility of holding the integrity (of the social body or personal identity)

Most apt reading for anyone interested in the challenges of the transition in culture that is shaping the century to come.

[Billiam · Rating 2 out of 5]

... hmm...

[Pat Falkner · Rating 2 out of 5]

way too intellectual for me

[Christian Grimaldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sennett es una maravilla.