Witold Rybczynski. (2015). Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Witold Rybczynski. 2015. Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Witold Rybczynski, Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Witold Rybczynski. Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

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1. • value: blight
2. • value: city
3. • value: Urban planning
4. • value: Frank Lloyd Wright
5. • value: Cities
6. • value: Buildings
7. • value: suburban
8. • value: MALL
9. • value: public
10. • value: urban development
11. • value: Consumerism
12. • value: real estate
13. • value: bauhaus
14. • value: retail
15. • value: Design
16. • value: zoning
17. • value: Urban Studies
18. • value: commercial
19. • value: Planning
20. • value: urban design
21. • value: shopping mall
22. • value: sprawl
23. • value: shopping center
24. • value: brutalism

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   • fileAs: Rybczynski, Witold
   • bioText: Witold Rybczynski has written about architecture for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Slate. Among his award-winning books are Home, The Most Beautiful House in the World, and A Clearing in the Distance, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. He lives with his wife in Philadelphia, where he is the emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. How Architecture Works is his eighteenth book.
   • name: Witold Rybczynski

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Mysteries of the Mall

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A deep exploration of modern life that examines our cities, public places, and homes

Following How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski casts a seasoned critical eye over the modern scene with Mysteries of the Mall. His subject is nothing less than the broad setting of our metropolitan world.
In thirty-five discerning essays, Rybczynski ranges over subjects as varied as shopping malls, Central Park, the Paris opera house, and America's shrinking cities. Along the way, he examines our post-9/11 obsession with security, the revival of the big-city library, the rise of college towns, and our fascination with vacation homes, and he visits Disney's planned community of Celebration. By looking at contemporary architects as diverse as Frank Gehry, Moshe Safdie, and Bing Thom, revisiting old masters such as Christopher Wren, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright, and considering such unsung innovators as Stanley H. Durwood, the inventor of the Cineplex, Rybczynski ponders the role of global cities in an age of tourism and what places attract us in the modern city.
Mysteries of the Mall is required reading for anyone curious about the modern world and how it came to be that way.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Peter Whoriskey, The Washington Post on How Architecture Works
   • content:

     "[How Architecture Works]'s chief pleasure may be that Rybczynski, ever the engaging and thoughtful writer, offers a wide-ranging tour of the glories and curiosities, old and new, in the field."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Laura Miller, Salon on How Architecture Works

   • content: "The beautiful and the useful, in buildings as well as books, never becomes obsolete. Neither do writers like Rybczynski, who can teach us how to recognize and appreciate both."
3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 18, 2015
     Reviewed by Anthony Paletta Rybczynski’s latest essay collection, a sharp culling of his previously published work, may seem at first glance like a World’s Shortest Books entry (how many mysteries have you found at the Gap?), but the best detectives find much in overlooked corners, and this, as usual, is Rybczinski’s work here. An eloquent critic with a range of interests as broad as his voluminous published work, Rybczynski is unusually willing to go sleuthing into the architecture and design of the everyday.A strong interest in the lived experience of architecture—not its aseptic uninhabited condition—undergirds the essays in the volume, whether concerning museum “starchitecture” or Disneyland. The titular essay explores the work of John Brinckerhoff Jackson, a theorist heterodox in his enthusiasm for the built suburban environment and a notion of vernacular architecture sympathetic to actual vernacular conditions—namely postwar suburban growth. Rybczynski notes, “Few of my architect friends share my interest in food courts.” Many espouse notions about form following function, but few seem interested in spaces where function radically defines form, namely that food court. In an essay on homes, Rybczynski offers perceptive and praiseful accounts of premier 20th century residential construction, but is bold enough to answer the question, “Do many experimental houses make good homes?” with “Many don’t.” He mulls over the varied functions of a performance space in a review of the Opéra Bastille in Paris; acoustics and sightlines take obvious precedence but the function of lobbies and interactivity with the city also receive significant attention. Rybczynski’s perennial personal enthusiasms crop up: there’s an essay on Central Park, one on Palladio, another on Wright. Other essays shine light on more unfamiliar names: Bing Thom’s supple Canadian work and the eclectic small-scale builder-architect George Holt, in Charleston, S.C. Rybczynski is not so much of a contrarian to ignore or dislike larger names: Le Corbusier and I.M. Pei are the focus of graceful accounts. The most interesting selections are on more esoteric topics. There’s a superb piece on the nearly 70 years of unsung work that the engineering firm Arup has done to make countless iconic buildings actually stand. Another essay unspools the longer history, and current blight, of those bollards that have come to fence civic structures since 9/11.The prose sparkles: “When Richard Meier amplifies and extends the architectural elements that infuse his houses with a retro-modern charm into larger buildings, the effect can be deadening, like listening to a Chopin étude that never ends.” In discussing Disney’s planned community, Rybczynski quips, “the credits for the design of Celebration resemble a Hollywood screenplay.” In his acknowledgements, Rybczynski notes he has written some 350 essays since his last collection, Looking Around (1992); this book features 34 of those works. Over the course of his career, Rybczynski has proven a deft guide to the work of countless architects; here, he is just as sage a curator of his own criticism. (Sept.)Anthony Paletta writes the Spaces column for the Wall Street Journal.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from June 1, 2015
     In this illuminating collection of essays, Rybczynski (Emeritus, Architecture/Univ. of Pennsylvania; How Architecture Works, 2013, etc.) documents the wide-ranging effects of the men who built America in the 20th century. The title of the book is misleading, as the author explores our lives in homes, small towns, cities, and gardens, in addition to our shopping habits. The movement into and then out of the cities spawned the highway and transportation systems that enabled urban sprawl. Rybczynski puts names to the people who drove America's growth, beginning with Fracis Turner, who ran the National Highway Program from 1954. Marshall McLuhan's Law of Technological Second Lives suggested the importance of reusing obsolete city spaces-a good example of urban preservation is San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square-but not all attempts to rehab unused buildings are successful. The architects whom the author calls the "Show Dogs" are winning competitions for big city museums, music venues, and libraries. Such buildings as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, I.M. Pei's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and Sydney's Opera House are the sought-after icons that have succeeded in bolstering their economies and bringing in tourists. Rybczynski doesn't limit himself to architects; he also shows the vast change in landscape architecture in the 19th century under Frederick Law Olmsted. There's an excellent piece on Arup, the structural engineering firm that Pritzker Prize winners (the Nobel Prize for architects) turn to more than any other. This all-encompassing book includes essays on post-9/11 security designs, individual homes, planned communities, and more. Rybczynski doesn't leave out the masters, either; he examines Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Andrea Palladio, the incomparable Renaissance genius whose work continues to produce endless permutations. A superb book for those interested in architectural history, written in an easygoing style by a man with encyclopedic knowledge and an obvious great love for building.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 1, 2015
     In addition to his much-lauded books, including How Architecture Works (2013), Rybczynski has published more than 350 essays since his last collection came out in the early '90s. This new compilation culls from that multitude 35 crisp essays in which he analyzes the architectural merits of food courts in suburban malls with the same evenhanded lucidity that he uses to assess Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Rybczynski's manner of writing mirrors his architectural taste: erudite and approachable. One barely needs an interest in architecture to be captivated by the first half of this collection, in which he both manages to discuss in detail the appallingly failed design of public-housing projects such as Chicago's Cabrini-Green, and to narrate a trip through the construction of Walt Disney World's first master-planned town, dubbed Celebration. In the second half, which delves more deeply into the architecture world, Rybczynski decrees that time, not prize-giving juries, is the ultimate judge of a building's worth. The same is true with these essaysand time shows they have worn quite well.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

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A deep exploration of modern life that examines our cities, public places, and homes

Following How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski casts a seasoned critical eye over the modern scene with Mysteries of the Mall. His subject is nothing less than the broad setting of our metropolitan world.
In thirty-five discerning essays, Rybczynski ranges over subjects as varied as shopping malls, Central Park, the Paris opera house, and America's shrinking cities. Along the way, he examines our post-9/11 obsession with security, the revival of the big-city library, the rise of college towns, and our fascination with vacation homes, and he visits Disney's planned community of Celebration. By looking at contemporary architects as diverse as Frank Gehry, Moshe Safdie, and Bing Thom, revisiting old masters such as Christopher Wren, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright, and considering such unsung innovators as Stanley H. Durwood, the inventor of the Cineplex,...

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