The scenes of the street and other essays - Anthony Vidler

Anthony Vidler, an internationally recognized scholar, theorist, and critic of
modern and contemporary architecture, is widely known for his essays on the most
pressing issues and debates in the field. This volume brings together a
collection of such writings-including the iconic, long unavailable "Scenes of
the Street"-into one volume. Scenes of the Street and Other Essays showcases Vidler's engaging and accessible expertise on both contemporary
and historic subjects that are relevant to today's concerns.

"Scenes of
the Street," a multi-faceted analysis of city planning is one such example;
other essays in this volume include "Unknown Lands: Guy Debord and the
Cartographies of a Landscape to be Invented," "Transparency and Utopia:
Constructing the Void from Pascal to Foucault," and "The Modern Acropolis: Tony
Garnier from La Cit Antique to the Cit Industrielle."

Vidler writes in
his introduction:

In the following essays, I have interrogated the
struggle for an urban architecture in the modern period, its critiques and
aspirations, in the belief that understanding the historical dimensions of the
debate will lead to a renewal of interest in an architecture calculated to
redeem, if only partially, our "planet of slums" and its deteriorating
environment; an interest that will not simply reject "utopia" out of hand or
fall back into the complacencies of nostalgia. Written during a period in which
the debates themselves were actively engaged by critics and supporters of
modernism, they reflect contemporary issues as they search for their prehistory.
As historical inquiries, they inevitably also engage the transformations in
history writing itself since 1970, intellectual responses to the social and
political conditions of postwar modernity.

This fascinating series of
essays on issues and figures is an invaluable resource for architects and art
historians and enthusiasts of structure and substance alike.