The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna

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The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna, Donald J. Olsen, emne: historie og samfund

Hardcover: 346 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press; First edition, 1986
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0300028709
ISBN-13: 978-0300028706

About: "Examines public buildings and homes in ninteenth- century London, Paris, and Vienna, and explains how each city reflected the characteristic lifestyle of its population"

Editorial Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly-
"Three European capitalsLondon, Paris and Viennawere each deliberately conceived as a unified work of art, designed by 19th century planners and architects to reinforce dominant classes' values and serve their leisure pursuits. With this provocative thesis, Vassar history professor Olsen opens new vistas on urban environments in a delightful and gripping, richly illustrated social history. London's Regent Street served simultaneously as a north-south route to relieve traffic congestion and a stage set for the wealthy to display their clothes; its completion drove up rents by one-third. Louis Napoleon's radical surgery on Paris gave it a look of standardized regularity, but Olsen disputes the popular view that the aim was to prevent Parisian uprisings by breaking up working-class districts. "
From Library Journal-
"A sweeping comparative analysis of three great European metropolises in the 19th century, equally concerned with ordinary social life and monumental civic life. Olsen, author of two earlier books on the growth of London, mines with a cultivated air an English vein of writing about architecture, rendering his subject matter as a document of history and society and scattering drawing room references to T.S. Eliot and Edith Wharton. He interprets the city not as a department store of bourgeois consumption, the "product" of industrialization, but rather as a vessel of civilization itself, a theater of historicist consciousness. "