Cityscapes of Boston
by Robert Campbell, Peter Vanderwarker (Photographer)
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When John Winthrop called Boston "a citty upon a hill," he was speaking theocratically: it might better be called a city that floats upon the sea. Most Bostonians today live on land that was once marsh or bay, and the harbor that made the city prosper is empty of clipper ships and full of yachts. In a brilliant interaction of the visual and the verbal, Robert Campbell, one of America's foremost architecture critics, and Peter Vanderwarker, architectural photographer and archivist, take us show more through the entire history of America's most venerable city. Founded on a narrow-necked peninsula shaped like a snake's head, Boston over the centuries has been transformed, through numerous changes in economic fortunes, architectural styles, and ethnic groups. From the infancy of photography, people with cameras have recorded the life of Boston's streets, people, and buildings. Cityscapes of Boston, with its elegant and discerning text by Robert Campbell, displays the striking contrasts between past and present as well as some surprising continuities. Campbell's narrative asks--and often answers--questions about what enables a city to thrive, what makes it decline, and how architecture and planning nourish or stifle human needs. Peter Vanderwarker's painstaking research among historical photographs, combined with his own freshly created images, show us dramatically how cities grow and change. Fashions in architecture and in urban planning and design, waves of immigration, revolutions in technology, fire and flood, poverty and prosperity, all have affected the city and its people. The effect of Cityscapes of Boston is that of a fascinating historical time warp, enabling the student, the teacher, and the common reader to visualize a great American city as it has been, as it is now, and how it promises to change, for better or worse. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Although I enjoy the "that was then, this is now" photos, there was one too many essay whining about soul-less skyscrapers monstrous concrete boxes. Granted, some modern architecture IS ugly, awkward and soul-less, but their obvious prejudice for earlier architectural styles makes this book rather uneven. They give the impression that NOTHING in Boston has changed for the better.
I do want to go to all these locations now and see what change has occured since the book was published (1992).
I do want to go to all these locations now and see what change has occured since the book was published (1992).
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Robert Campbell was born on March 31, 1937 in Buffalo, New York. He is a writer and an architect. Campbell is a graduate of Harvard College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he received the Appleton Traveling Fellowship and Francis Kelley Prize. Campbell show more became an architect in 1975, as a consultant for the improvement of cultural institutions, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He has been an urban design consultant to cities and is an advisor to the Mayors' Institute on City Design, which he helped found. In 1997 he was architect-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. Campbell's poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Harvard Review, among other publications. Campbell has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Boston Architectural Center, and the University of North Carolina. He also is a former Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1993-2002 he was visiting Sam Gibbons Eminent Scholar in Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of South Florida. In 2003 he was a Senior Fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University. In 1996, Campbell won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, he has received the AIA¿s Medal for Criticism; the Commonwealth Award of the Boston Society of Architects; and a Design Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2002 he won a national Columbia Dupont Award for "Beyond the Big Dig". He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His titles include Cityscapes of Boston: An American City Through Time and Civic Builders. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Important places
- Boston, Massachusetts, USA
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- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.07)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 2
- UPCs
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