CITIES & PEOPLE
A Social and Architectural History
by Mark Girouard
397 pp., including Notes and Index
Illustrated
ISBN )-300-03968-0
Yale University Press
$32.50 Paper
There is something about cities, especially large cities, that both
attracts and repels. Cities hold a fascination for most people, even
though the fascination can be as that of a rabbit for a snake.
There is the fear that city life is life filled with dangers and
inconveniences - crime, air and noise pollution, overcrowding, and the
often brutal lack of concern of one person for his or her neighbor. But at
the same time there is the fascination of the city in a positive light -
cultural, diverse, exciting, grand, and civilized. Cities are where it
happens.
Mark Girouard, an outstanding architectural historian, has in Cities &
People created a monumental work of art. It is a work that is literate as
well as informative; entertaining as well as illuminating. To quote a
review by Jonathan Raban in the London Sunday Times, "Girouard is a living
encyclopedia of hitherto unattended details and his text is encrusted with
facts, as if facts themselves were jewels. There is much merit in this: a
glance at any random page of Cities & People will teach you at least seven
things you didn't know before."
For one thing, the book is magnificently illustrated. Paintings, drawings,
plans, sketches, and photographs are at almost every page, beautifully
reproduced. Girouard has sensitively selected the illustrations to be
virtually seamless with the text - both flow together effortlessly. It is
a book where lingering over the illustrations is a delight; almost an end
in itself.
The production values are a tribute to the outstanding excellence of
Yale's University Press. This is especially apparent in the beautiful
reproductions of the watercolors that convey so much information to social
historians but are rarely seen outside scholarly research collections.
We are taken from tenth century Constantinople, which "floated like a
vision above the waters of the Bosphorus, still inviolate, still powerful,
the biggest, richest and most sophisticated city in the world," to
twentieth century Los Angeles . . . "a city of wild and wonderful and
banal buildings, a city of bungalow-slums in junk-strewn gardens, a
Mexican city, negro city, Japanese city, a city of oil wells and art
galleries, surfboards and sunsets, palm trees and Pepsi-Cola, the city of
Philip Marlowe and Charlie Chaplin, of Mickey Mouse and Frank Lloyd
Wright, of weirdos, professors, gangsters, gurus, millionaires, and nice,
ordinary people, a failed Jerusalem, a low-density Babylon."
All along this Grand Highway, Girouard lingers with affectionate erudition
over both the monumental and the inconsequential. Buildings are singled
out not alone for their architectural splendor, but also for their impact
on the workings of city life. Often they illumine both categories, as in
the great thirteenth century Cloth Hall at Ypres.
Nothing seems to escape his eye and pen: Corn mills and granaries, palaces
and piazzas, colleges and cafes, city layouts, individual floor plans.
Each and all contribute to our understanding of how cities are born; how
they prosper and expand; how they lanquish and die.
The book is divided into three major sections - The City Reborn, The City
Triumphant, and The Exploding City.
The first of these carries us through the medieval cities, whose growth
and prosperity was controlled by guilds, and whose leading citizens were
the merchants and traders, rather than the nobility. Florence and Ghent,
Bruges and Venice are here amongst many others, separated by geography and
race, but united by the common bond of buying and selling.
The second section deals with the emergence of the great cities: the
rebirth of Rome, the rise of Paris and Amsterdam. The self-awareness of
the city as an entity to be enriched and made splendid in appearance as
well as in practicality and political power.
The third explores the industrial city - Manchester, for example. ". . .
the factories extend their flanks of fouler brick one after another, bare,
with shutterless windows, like economical and colossal prisons . . . and
inside, lit by gas jets and deafened by the uproar of their own labour,
toil thousands of workmen, penned in, regimented, hands active, feet
motionless, all day and every day, mechanically serving their machines."
It also carries us across the Atlantic to America for the first time. Of
New York and Chicago and Philadelphia. Of tenements and mansions and parks
and waterfronts. Of the population swelled by the millions of immigrants.
Of the birth of the skyscraper.
However, this is not simply an architectural history. It is that, but it
is also a penetrating social history. Take as one example the section on
the uses of leisure, which represented an entirely new development in the
European city. Medieval cities were basically practical, where people
lived because of the work they did, because of the safety behind city
walls, and where leisure activities were generally confined to religious
festivals. When leisure became possible, it brought with it the foundation
of what would come to be called 'society.' "Society became an extremely
important element in cities . . . theatres, opera houses, pleasure
gardens, assembly rooms, race-courses, coffee-houses, shops, entire
neighborhoods and ultimately entire towns grew up to cater for it." ,P>
This is an exceptional book in every way. For anyone who has an interest
in the interplay of architectural and social values, it is a must. A true
joy to read. A feast to browse through. A source of seemingly unending
information.
Mark Girouard is one of Britain's leading architectural historians. He is
the author of many books and well-known for his work on radio and
television. He has lectured in Britain, Australia and the United States,
and was Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University in 1975-76. * * *