The Continuous City: Fourteen Essays on Architecture and Urbanisation

Description

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.

Lars Lerup has been a Professor at and Dean of the Rice School of Architecture in Houston, Texas, 1993 2009. Before his tenure at the Rice he taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley. He currently holds a teaching and reserach appointment at Humboldt University's Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques in Berlin.