On his book City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present
Cover Interview of January 28, 2020
A close-up
The most propitious enticement for a browser may be the 32-page
color insert of photographs, maps and drawings of American environments. A
picture may not always be worth a thousand words, but it is easier to discuss
places with representative images of those places, first as these places may
have been imagined and drawn, then as they were being planned, and finally as they
assumed three-dimension.
The images in the color insert are duplicates of more modest
black-and-white versions that directly accompany the text. My exceptional editor,
Ian Malcolm, argued that the book must foremost be for readers. Excessively
illustrated books for Ian distract from the stories being told, as in the
proverbial, oversized coffee table volume in which text becomes secondary to images,
rather than the reverse. This, of course, is counter to the instincts of an
architect whose eyes tend first to focus on the illustration. Thus, the book’s color
insert became a compromise among author and editor, allowing this author to compose
a few stories with images.
As an example, I juxtaposed each of the five monumental canvases
of Thomas Cole’s 1830’s Course of Empire with five analogous moments in
the life of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Cole’s Transcendentalist-inspired
intent was a warning against unimpeded progress at the expense of nature. This for
him ultimately risked desolation, not of the natural world as we fear today,
but of all that artificially built up progress; the fate of Imperial Rome. The Chicago’s
World’s Fair was, of course, committed to an exaltation of human progress. However,
as a temporal environment its evolution from a swampy field, to a wonderous
architectural ensemble, to the demolition of that ensemble at the Fair’s
conclusion, to its transformation into a pastoral park, replicated in three
dimensions Cole’s haunting course of empire.
This juxtaposition is to help connect Cole’s warning to
present environmental concerns. By the end of the 19th century the expectation
of sustaining a “Nature’s Nation,” the focus and title of Chapter 2, had
receded under the onslaught of industrialization. Cole’s prescient concern
about the consequences of not heeding nature resonate today, more so than those
architectural monuments of the World’s Fair, their ephemerality, indeed,
supporting Cole’s and our anxieties about the despoiling of nature.
Another attempt at a visual story in the book is the 2-page spread
with three images depicting an optimized place for labor. It could be viewed as
a graphic summation of chapter 5, which discusses a tradition of locating a
company town away from town, being today overturned by headquarters of
companies returning to town centers. The images are of a canonical 19th-century
mill town, a mid-20th-century suburban corporate enclave, and the new Amazon
Headquarters, having recently relocated from suburban Seattle to its downtown.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
The most propitious enticement for a browser may be the 32-page color insert of photographs, maps and drawings of American environments. A picture may not always be worth a thousand words, but it is easier to discuss places with representative images of those places, first as these places may have been imagined and drawn, then as they were being planned, and finally as they assumed three-dimension.
The images in the color insert are duplicates of more modest black-and-white versions that directly accompany the text. My exceptional editor, Ian Malcolm, argued that the book must foremost be for readers. Excessively illustrated books for Ian distract from the stories being told, as in the proverbial, oversized coffee table volume in which text becomes secondary to images, rather than the reverse. This, of course, is counter to the instincts of an architect whose eyes tend first to focus on the illustration. Thus, the book’s color insert became a compromise among author and editor, allowing this author to compose a few stories with images.
As an example, I juxtaposed each of the five monumental canvases of Thomas Cole’s 1830’s Course of Empire with five analogous moments in the life of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Cole’s Transcendentalist-inspired intent was a warning against unimpeded progress at the expense of nature. This for him ultimately risked desolation, not of the natural world as we fear today, but of all that artificially built up progress; the fate of Imperial Rome. The Chicago’s World’s Fair was, of course, committed to an exaltation of human progress. However, as a temporal environment its evolution from a swampy field, to a wonderous architectural ensemble, to the demolition of that ensemble at the Fair’s conclusion, to its transformation into a pastoral park, replicated in three dimensions Cole’s haunting course of empire.
This juxtaposition is to help connect Cole’s warning to present environmental concerns. By the end of the 19th century the expectation of sustaining a “Nature’s Nation,” the focus and title of Chapter 2, had receded under the onslaught of industrialization. Cole’s prescient concern about the consequences of not heeding nature resonate today, more so than those architectural monuments of the World’s Fair, their ephemerality, indeed, supporting Cole’s and our anxieties about the despoiling of nature.
Another attempt at a visual story in the book is the 2-page spread with three images depicting an optimized place for labor. It could be viewed as a graphic summation of chapter 5, which discusses a tradition of locating a company town away from town, being today overturned by headquarters of companies returning to town centers. The images are of a canonical 19th-century mill town, a mid-20th-century suburban corporate enclave, and the new Amazon Headquarters, having recently relocated from suburban Seattle to its downtown.