In the Western world, cities have arguably never been more anxious: practical anxieties about personal safety and metaphysical anxieties about the uncertain place of the city in culture are the small change of journalism and political debate. Cities have long been regarded as problems, in need of drastic solutions. In this context, the contemporary revival of city centres is remarkable. But in a culture that largely fears the urban, how can the contemporary city be imagined? How is it supposed to be used or inhabited? What does it mean? Taking England since WWII as its principal focus, this provocative and original book considers the Western city at a critical moment in its history.

In the western world, cities have, arguably, never been more anxious: realistic anxieties about personal safety, and metaphorical anxieties about the uncertain place of the city in culture are the small change of journalism and political debate. Cities have long been regarded as problems, in need of drastic solutions. In this context, the contemporary revival of city centers is remarkable. But in a culture that largely fears the urban, how can the contemporary city be imagined? How is it supposed to be used or inhabited? What should it look like? What should be its purpose? Which existing forms of urban life might serve as models for a new city? Taking England since WW2 as its principal focus, this provocative and original book considers the western city at a critical moment in its history.
Historically among the most urbanized of countries, England is an extraordinary urban laboratory. The energy and thoroughness with which its cities have been transformed in the 1990s have lessons for urban development everywhere.
"The Anxious City "examines the problem of the contemporary city through a series of detailed case studies: Poundbury, Milton Keynes, Liverpool's Albert Dock redevelopment, Trafalgar Square, Canary Wharf, the Great Court of the British Museum, and central Manchester after the 1996 IRA bomb. It deals with some broader cultural phenomena too: the continuing attraction of picturesque aesthetics, and the lure of southern European urbanism (exemplified by the RIBA's canonization of Barcelona) and the complex, contradictory relationship between urbanism in England and the USA. The experience of these places, the book argues, shows a culture where the idea of the cityremains contested: the frantic redevelopment of city centers in the 1990s represented one vision of the city - the city of spectacular consumption, competing in some imaginary urban race with other world cities. But such development took place against continuing suburbanization and sprawl. In spite of allthe building works, the city was still being worked out
This book is a cultural history that will be essential reading for anyone interested in the recent history of urban life. It argues that the contemporary city is uniquely anxious, caught between nostalgia for the past, and uncertainty about the future. At a crucial moment in the history of the city, it cuts through the urbanistic propaganda spread by architects and politicians. This unique and challenging study will be of interest to students and practitioners alike.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) is today regarded as chief representative of French revolutionary architecture. With his extraordinary inventiveness he projected the architectural ideals of his era. Ledoux's influential buildings and projects are presented and interpreted both aesthetically and historically in this book. His best-known projects - the Royal Saltwords of Arc-et-Senans, the tollgates of Paris, the ideal city of Chaux - reveal the architect's allegiance to the principles of antiquity and Renaissance but also illustrate the evolution of his own utopian language. With the French Revolution, Ledoux ceased building as his contemporaries perceived him as a royal architect. He focused on the development of his architectural theory and redefined the vision of the modern architect.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) is today regarded as chief representative of French revolutionary architecture. With his extraordinary inventiveness he projected the architectural ideals of his era. Ledoux's influential buildings and projects are presented and interpreted both aesthetically and historically in this book. His best-known projects - the Royal Saltwords of Arc-et-Senans, the tollgates of Paris, the ideal city of Chaux - reveal the architect's allegiance to the principles of antiquity and Renaissance but also illustrate the evolution of his own utopian language. With the French Revolution, Ledoux ceased building as his contemporaries perceived him as a royal architect. He focused on the development of his architectural theory and redefined the vision of the modern architect.

An in-depth exploration of the design process and teaching methods of the remarkable British architect as revealed by the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal The British architect James Frazer Stirling (1924-1992) stimulated impassioned responses among both supporters and detractors, and he continues to be the subject of fierce debate. He earned international renown through such innovative-and frequently controversial-projects as the Leicester University Engineering Building (1959-63); the History Faculty building at Cambridge University (1964-67); the Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (1977-84); the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain (1984); and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University (1979-84). Stirling was also a visiting professor at the Yale School of Architecture, where he trained and influenced many of the current leaders in the field. Fully illustrated with previously unpublished documents and new photography from the James Stirling/Michael Wilford Archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, this book allows for a close examination of design drawings, photographs, and models spanning Stirling's entire career. These materials deepen our understanding of the influences, early formation, approach, and process of an architect whose work resists labeling. Filled with in-depth analytical and critical presentations of exemplary projects and their reception, the volume reveals Stirling to be a remarkably informed and consistent thinker and writer on architecture. Published in association with the Yale Center for British Art and the Canadian Centre for Architecture Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art 10/14/2010 - 01/02/2011 Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal Spring 2012

From Noah's Ark to Diller + Scofidio's "Blur" Building, a distinguished art historian maps new ways to think about architecture's origin and development. Trained as an art historian but viewing architecture from the perspective of a "displaced philosopher," Hubert Damisch in these essays offers a meticulous parsing of language and structure to "think architecture in a different key," as Anthony Vidler puts it in his introduction. Drawn to architecture because it provides "an open series of structural models," Damisch examines the origin of architecture and then its structural development from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. He leads the reader from Jean-Francois Blondel to Eugene Viollet-le-Duc to Mies van der Rohe to Diller + Scofidio, with stops along the way at the Temple of Jerusalem, Vitruvius's De Architectura, and the Louvre. In the title essay, Damisch moves easily from Diderot's Encylopedie to Noah's Ark (discussing the provisioning, access, floor plan) to the Pan American Building to Le Corbusier to Ground Zero. Noah's Ark marks the origin of construction, and thus of architecture itself. Diderot's Encylopedie entry on architecture followed his entry on Noah's Ark; architecture could only find its way after the Flood. In these thirteen essays, written over a span of forty years, Damisch takes on other histories and theories of architecture to trace a unique trajectory of architectural structure and thought. The essays are, as Vidler says, "a set of exercises" in thinking about architecture.

The Architectural Uncanny presents an engaging and original series of meditations on issues and figures that are at the heart of the most pressing debates surrounding architecture today. Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally "unhomely" modern condition. The essays are at once historical - serving to situate contemporary discourse in its own intellectual tradition and theoretical - opening up the complex and difficult relationships between politics, social thought, and architectural design in an era when the reality of homelessness and the idealism of the neo-avant-garde have never seemed so far apart.Vidler, one of the deftest and surest critics of the contemporary scene, explores aspects of architecture through notions of the uncanny as they have been developed in literature, philosophy, and psychology from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. He interprets the unsettling qualities of today's architecture - its fragmented neo-constructivist forms reminiscent of dismembered bodies, its "seeing walls" replicating the passive gaze of domestic cyborgs, its historical monuments indistinguishable from glossy reproductions - in the light of modern reflection on questions of social and individual estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness.Focusing on the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau, John Hejduk, Elizabeth Diller, and Ricardo Scofidio, as well as theorists of the urban condition, Vidler delineates the problems and paradoxes associated with the subject of domesticity.Anthony Vidler is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. His most recent book is Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Regime."

How psychological ideas of space have profoundly affected architectural and artistic expression in the twentieth century. Beginning with agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the late nineteenth century, followed by shell shock and panic fear after World War I, phobias and anxiety came to be seen as the mental condition of modern life. They became incorporated into the media and arts, in particular the spatial arts of architecture, urbanism, and film. This "spatial warping" is now being reshaped by digitalization and virtual reality. Anthony Vidler is concerned with two forms of warped space. The first, a psychological space, is the repository of neuroses and phobias. This space is not empty but full of disturbing forms, including those of architecture and the city. The second kind of warping is produced when artists break the boundaries of genre to depict space in new ways. Vidler traces the emergence of a psychological idea of space from Pascal and Freud to the identification of agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the nineteenth century to twentieth-century theories of spatial alienation and estrangement in the writings of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Focusing on current conditions of displacement and placelessness, he examines ways in which contemporary artists and architects have produced new forms of spatial warping. The discussion ranges from theorists such as Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze to artists such as Vito Acconci, Mike Kelley, Martha Rosler, and Rachel Whiteread. Finally, Vidler looks at the architectural experiments of Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelblau, Daniel Libeskind, Greg Lynn, Morphosis, and Eric Owen Moss in the light of new digital techniques that, while relying on traditional perspective, have radically transformed the composition, production, and experience-perhaps even the subject itself-of architecture.