Existing histories of modern architecture typically give their highest praise to private houses and their most severe condemnation to architect-authored urban plans, often neglecting the built works that are no smaller than a single building and possibly as large as an urban block, the middle or institutional scale, where culturally significant urban transformation actually takes place. Urban architecture is a timely topic as today cities worldwide are suffering accelerated urbanisation, which is often dehumanising and destructive, especially to the unbuilt environment, airs, waters and soils. The middle or institutional scale is shown to activate and actualise latent potentials for cultural experience and environmental intelligence, allowing the city to surprise itself and delight in its discoveries. In Projecting Urbanity, David Leatherbarrow, via author-architect texts by his former doctorate students, lays out the basis for a revision of modern architecture's contribution to cities and their culture. Presenting a series of texts featuring buildings or their parts of various scales - from the construction detail, to the room or garden, to ensembles within a neighborhood - the contributors introduce concepts for contemporary and future urban architecture, together with richly indicative examples from the past several decades. While architecture cannot "solve" today's urban problems, it certainly has a role to play in their productive transformation, articulating opportunities for life and culture that are more humane, less wasteful, and more beautiful.

The book explores the transformation of the city fabric and public spaces since the time of Industrial Revolution. Using the time frame from the late 18th century as a ground for investigation, this inquiry focuses on the visible and non-visible manifestations, i.e. upon the practical, functional, material, as well as representational and symbolic aspects of the city fabric. It inquires into the various ways we understand and relate to the spatial structure of the city, the relationship between the nature of the city fabric and public life in the city, the pretexts and criteria for the creation as well as transformation of the city fabric in different social and cultural contexts, whether symbolic or pragmatic, with a case study of Bangkok and its transformation during the 19th century.

The subject of this book is twofold - a concept and its meaning, an architectural culture and its preoccupation. The architectural culture is that of Vienna during the last twenty-five years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the themes discussed represented the paradoxical nature of architecture and cities in response to modern industrial society. The concept in question is, or appears at first sight to be, our own Twenty-First century concept in its infancy: the concept of space (Raum), which was first explicitly formulated as an architectural term during the 1890s. This book examines the meanings of space in relation to the notion of enclosure and cladding (Bekleidung), particularly in the related work of five theorists and architects: August Schmarsow, Gottfried Semper, Camillo Sitte, Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos.