After The City; Author: Lerup, Lars; Paperback

Author: Lerup, Lars
Paperback; 42 Illustrations
208 pages
Published: October 2001
The MIT Press
ISBN: 0262621576

The city's reign over our senses, our moods, our very ways of being is outmoded. The suburban metropolis has superseded the city. The new building materials are non-material: electricity, telephony, weather, time, and so forth. Consequently, according to Lars Lerup, architecture and architects must be rethought.Until now, architects have been trained to serve the elite few, as reflectedin a belief in customization and the uniqueness of each project. Instead, Lerup holds, architectural educators should promote teamwork and the design of authorless objects, combined with an integration of design and practice. Before we can rethink the architectural curriculum, however, we must rethink the metropolis.And rethink the metropolis is just what Lerup does. In an intellectually far-rangiAn architect's view of the new metropolitan consciousness and the suburban metropolis as the future frontier. This work moves from contemplation of the form and philosophical implications of the Pantheon to discussing how Levittown residents create community. The author takes an optimistic view of the open metropolis - for him not the site of unavoidable uniformity or mediocrity, but an exciting frontier.