UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · CITY PLANNING · HISTORY
Anthony Sutcliffe
Many times since the Earth was young, the place had lain under the sea.
— from London
Most acclaimed
Paris
1937
"Paris, with its majestic buildings, elegant boulevards, and colourful neighbourhoods, is often hailed as the most beautiful city in the world. In this lavishly illustrated book, one of the city's leading historians links the beauty of Paris to its harmonious architecture, the product of a powerful tradition of classical design running from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Anthony Sutcliffe traces the main features of the development of Parisian building and architecture since Roman times, explaining the interaction of continuity and innovation and relating it to power, social structure, the property market, fashion, and the creativity of its architects. Three hundred illustrations, most in colour, complement the text, expressing the full character of Paris architecture." "Sutcliffe describes in fascinating detail how Paris merged medieval tradition with a Renaissance architecture imported from Italy - first by order of the Crown, then by the aristocracy, the Church, and the middle classes. Under Louis XIV this style became clearly French. After 1789 revolutions and industrialization threatened to undermine Parisian classicism, but it was reinforced by Haussmann in mid-century as part of the most impressive urban development project of all time. Because of Haussmann, says Sutcliffe, public and private buildings conformed to a more rigid design convention than any that Paris had previously known, a classical tradition that remained entrenched until the 1950s, when modernism made its impact in a high-rise revolution during the de Gaulle era. However, explains Sutcliffe, by 1970 this modernist architecture was rejected by the Paris public, and in the last decade the city has seen the emergence of a restrained neo-modern architecture that blends sensitively with the Parisian tradition."--BOOK JACKET.
London
This dazzling and yet intimate book is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern collossus. Roy Porter writes a whole life of this world-renowned place - from the grid streets and fortresses of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror to the medieval, walled "most noble city" of churches, friars, and crown and town relationships. Within the crenellated battlements, manufactures and markets developed and street-life buzzed, enlivened with the cries of hawkers and peddlers. People worked, talked, haggled, and relaxed in London's medieval streets, while craftsmen lived where they worked, nestled trade-by-trade in neighborhoods. London's profile in 1500 was much as it was at the peak of Roman power. The city owed its courtly splendor and national pride of the Tudor Age to the phenomenal expansion of its capital. It was the envy of foreigners, the spur of civic patriotism, and a hub of culture, architecture, and great literature and new religion. Tudor Londoners had an insatiable appetite for new workshops, yards and stores, and comfortable homes; and makeshift quarters for laborers from rural areas began to dot the rising city.