Technology and Obsolescence
‘Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America’ by Giles Slade; Harvard University Press, 2007. 336pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 30 November 2007 I wasn’t looking forward to this book. The title seemed to sum up two popular contemporary pastimes, a despondency about societal progress and a condescension towards American (over)consumption. With its dust-jacket displaying a mountain of discarded computer...
Ornaments of the Metropolis
‘Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Culture’ by Henrik Reeh; MIT Press, 2006. 264pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 28 November 2006 Siegfried Kracauer is less well-known in this country than his friend and fellow critical theorist, Walter Benjamin. Even though they both wrote on the subject of urbanism, Kracauer effectively moved on from a critique of architecture to specialise in the sociology...
Cities, People, Planet
‘Cities People Planet: Liveable Cities for a Sustainable World’ by Herbert Girardet; Wiley-Academy, 2004. 304pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 9 October 2006 This is effectively another reworking of the 10-year-old The Gaia Atlas of Cities: New Directions for Sustainable Urban Living. All the usual suspects are displayed, albeit with significant new additions and examples. As with Reader and Jacobs, Mesopotamia gets a...
Design Like You Give A Damn
‘Design Like You Give A Damn: Architectural Responses To Humanitarian Crises’ by Architecture for Humanity (Eds), Thames & Hudson, 2006. 336pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 9 September 2006 Cameron Sinclair’s long-awaited book begins with a personal journey of social and ethical awareness, which has taken him from a lowly ‘CAD monkey’, as he describes himself, to a fully-fledged professional humanitarian. He now heads...
Arts in Society
‘Arts in Society’ edited by Paul Barker; Five Leaves, 2006. 196pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 18 August 2006 There’s a certain self-assured confidence about this series of essays that first appeared in the social sciences magazine New Society between 1964 and 1976. Barker, who was the editor of New Society from 1968 until 1986, has dipped into a rich archive and rescued some of that magazines finest writing, most...
Future Systems
‘Future Systems’ by Deyan Sudjic; Phaidon Press, 2006. 238pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 9 July 2006 At an Architecture Week event a few years ago, Amanda Levete, discussing Future Systems’ place in the modern architectural pantheon, announced that there were two types of people: ‘there are those who love our work and there are those who are stuck in the past.’ Ironically, this piece of vanity publishing encourages the...
Camouflage
Camouflage by Neil Leach; MIT Press, 2006. 289pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 1 July 2006 After the Alan Sokal affair, cultural studies writers have been nervous of transgressing the boundaries between pretentious quackery and insightfulness. Reviewers too, tread cautiously for fear of humiliation. This is a pity, because such intellectual caution tends to obscure the rare occasions when a cultural studies’ book hits the nail on the...
Kicking the Carbon Habit
‘Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy’ by William Sweet; Colmbia University Press, 2006. 239pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 30 June 2006 This is a remarkably detailed analysis of the evidence for climate change and the causal link between carbon emissions and global temperature rise. Starting from an acceptance of the famous Milankovitch cycles – identified in the...
The Revenge of Gaia
‘The Revenge of Gaia’ by James Lovelock; Penguin, 2006. 192pp Stephen Rowland reviews The Revenge of Gaia in the form of a letter to the author Dear James Many thanks for your latest book, The Revenge of Gaia. It’s given me plenty to think about. When I first read your earlier book on Planetary Medicine, I thought the whole idea of the Gaia metaphor was intriguing, and this book takes these ideas further, albeit in a...
Gardens of Canal Houses
‘Behind the Facades: Gardens of Canal Houses’ by Renate Dorrestein, Koen Kleijn and Harold Strak D’Arts/Architectura & Natura; 2005. 226pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 9 March 2006 This book comprises a long essay on the history of gardens in Amsterdam and photographs of those individual gardens over the seasons. Excellent and revealing though most of the images are, it is the historic overview that makes this book....
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