The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History explores the development of cities and the reasons behind their structure and form. The author is Professor Spiro Kostof (1936–1991), the distinguished architectural historian and professor.
Kostof focuses on the urban form and urban process as well as the patterns and elements of urban form seen in a historical perspective. For Kostof, urban design is an art, and urban process refers to the physical change of cities through time. The contents are divided into five main chapters: ‘Organic’ Patterns; The Grid; The City as Diagram; The Grand Manner; The Urban Skyline. The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs, maps and other architectural visualisations.
Cities are amalgams of buildings and people. They are inhabited settings from which daily rituals – the mundane and the extraordinary, the random and the staged – derive their validity. In the urban artifact and its mutations are condensed continuities of time and place. The city is the ultimate memorial of our struggles and glories: it is where the pride of the past is set on display.
– Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped, p. 16.
The copy now in our stock is in very good condition. The binding is solid, the pages are clean and tidy, and the covers show no visible faults except for some minor shelf wear.
