Breathing Cities: the Architecture of Movement

By Nick Barley

Every morning the world's major cities see the influx of millions of people, and every evening the same cities see an exodus. This book examines the impact of movement in the city, describing urban... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 3764362367
• ISBN13: 9783764362362
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Birkhäuser
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.0" x 0.5" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Full of important ideas

Although it's not consistently successful, this book contains many thought-provoking essays and photographic studies, all of which acknowledge the growing interest in the way cities work. It's a confusing book because it mixes ideas from artists, architects, philosophers and geographers, so the changes of pace are often hard to take. Many of the artists make work which is rather allusive and oblique, although I found nearly all of the art projects fascinating. Overall it's one of the better, and more accessible introductions to ideas which have been developed by philosophers such as Paul Virilio and Gilles Deleuze. If you want to know what they are about, read this book first.

Architecture In Movement

In Breathing Cities, projects from various disciplines are presented which closely examine the nature of urban flux. The British architect, Richard Rogers, remarks on the topic that "the buildings of the future will be less immobile than the temple of the past and more like moving, thinking, organic robots." Archigram as well also remarked once that "When it rains in Oxford Street, the architecture is no more significant than the rain." The work of various architects and artists is compiled under the headings "People","Goods", "Geography", "Information" and "Ideologies". The photographers Martyn Rose und Takashi Homma and the artists Langlands & Bell und Nathan Coley use the examples of London, Berlin and Tokyo to present their approach to "breathing cities". The architectural group "Foreign Office", the architect Zaha Hadid, the architectural historian Mark Cousins and the philosopher Simon Glendinning as well as other contributors reflect on the phenomenon of architecture in movement, each from their own particular point of view. In this highly valuable book, it is not the lifeless 'nice' side of the city which is focused on but the city as a living organ with all its "processes of digestion and excretion." Read more in a-matter.