Lars Lerup's conceptual explorations as a designer and thinker have been inspired by philosophers and artists from Foucault to Beckett. Lerup's furniture designs elude consumer culture. They conform neither to what is commonly understood as useful nor to what is typically regarded as necessary. They question the assumed functions of furniture and, at the same time, their assigned place in space. His pieces interrogate their roles and positions and introduce a disturbing or at least disconcerting note to conventional floor plans. This autobiography of a design project is about rendering visible the consumerism that is driving the current economically motivated expansion of our cities, and dealing with the consequences for the environment and society.

Swedish-American architect Lars Lerup's writings suggest a mindful collector as their author, rather than a scholar or a theoretician. Lerup sharply observes and analyses his urban environment and its properties, before adding his findings to his own theory of the modern city. Lerup wrote the fourteen essays in this new book as self-contained pieces, yet together they still form a coherent entity. The fourteen essays in The Continuous City offer a survey of Lerup's thinking on identity and monumentality are the relationship between nature and culture. His interest and reflections focus, among other things, on Roberto Burle Marx, a founder of modern landscape design; the 'dancing floors' of Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Central Library; Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road project in Miami Beach; and the character of urban icons like Coop Himmelb(l)au's Dalian International Conference Center. Lars Lerup invites his readers to join him on his journey and to be enriched, rather than instructed, en route.