image © Laurent Fievet / Getty Images

Witold Rybczynski’s new book skewers the avant garde, but overlooks prisons and urban shrinkage. Witold Rybczynski’s project, it seems, is to turn this trend around by examining the built environments of everyday life, and encouraging his readers to follow in kind.

The author of 19 books and several hundred essays and articles, Rybczynski is an academic with a populist bent. His career has been characterized by a writing style that is accessible, lively, and full of wonder, with a clear appeal to the general reading public. His latest collection, Mysteries of the Mall, culls from essays that originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. The bulk of the collection dates back to the 1990s, with a smattering of pieces from the last fifteen years. The result is an informal account of some of the 20th century’s most influential architects and architectural movements in the United States, alongside ruminations on the shifting currents, trends, challenges, and contradictions of American cities......Continue Reading

> via newrepublic.com