DISPASSIONATE OR ENGAGED.

POSTMODERN URBANISM

By Nan Ellin. New York: Princeton

Architectural Press. 2000. [pound]15.95

AFTER THE CITY

By Lars Lerup. London: MIT Press. 2000.

[pound]15.50

Beginning with discussions of modernism, Nan Ellin's Postmodern Urbanism traces and contextualizes the ebbs and flows of the postmodern debate about the city especially among architectural and urban design theorists. By presenting a most readable overview of what are often polar visions of the city and modernity, Ellin provides fodder for just about all the positions that have been taken in this debate as well as providing useful critiques of these same approaches. One should come away from this book more knowledgeable than one started but without any better sense of where these debates might be leading us. Ellin's discussion of the many conflicting architectural voices has no real passion even though it is clear she cares about the relationship between design and the city. On the one hand, Ellin can be congratulated for her balanced analyses of the many theories she discusses and avoidance of an overarching metanarrative to carry her analyses. On the other hand, one goes away wondering if the multiplicity of voices that she and the postmodernists celebrate is the path to a more open and engaged world. Or, whether this multiplicity of voices is symptomatic of a discourse, that unlike modernism, has found itself increasingly removed from the economic, political, social and even cultural practices and decisions that are responsible for contemporary urbanism.

Lars Lerup's work suffers from no lack of passion. His is a unique combination of modernist concerns and values with a willingness to engage that which is different and new in the American city. Rather than bemoan sprawl and the ascendancy of the private home over the public street, Lerup sees these new developments as something with which the architect can and indeed must come to grips. By providing a rich textual description of Houston and what needs to be confronted, refrained and rethought, most centrally the single family house, Lerup provides a most challenging set of ideas for dealing with the new forms of American - and soon to be European I suspect - urbanism. His call for more teamwork, more concern for use, for an authorless architecture and his notion that sprawl is not chaos but a new mega-shape and the single family house a critical piece of urban form, among other things, puts lie to so much that are givens in contemporary discourse. Agree with Lerup or not, his work is a salutary call for an architecture of engagement that revels in its belief that architecture can and should be a part of making our world a better place.