From a Cause to a Style

I have learned profoundly from Nathan Glazer's cultural perspectives and deep insights, engaging the extraordinary and the ordinary. From a Cause to a Style is a work I consider most relevant and significant for our time via its all-encompassing range and its richness of detail involving multiple urban, architectural, technical, and social issues-recent, current, and future. -- Robert Venturi, architect and author This collection is a reminder that in addition to being an urban sociologist, an astute commentator on social issues, and a public intellectual, Nathan Glazer is an insightful and provocative architecture critic. -- Witold Rybczynski, author of "Home: A Short History of an Idea" Nathan Glazer stands in the grand but fragile American tradition of the humanist architectural critic. He is also one of our great complexifiers. Whether he is writing about cities, streets, public spaces, or particular buildings, he notices things that seem to escape the attention of the professional--though not always of the general public. To read him is to become aware of one's own architectural experience, and to begin thinking hard about how it might be improved. -- Mark Lilla, University of Chicago This is a remarkable collection of essays that only Nathan Glazer could write. It sums up and partly explains the inability of contemporary architecture to deal with the problems of modern urbanism and to address many practical issues of building. As Glazer points out, an architectural tradition that identified itself by its capacity to focus the issues of functionalism has ended up by almost totally ignoring them. -- Robert Gutman, Lecturer in Architecture, Princeton University

Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This work includes the articles and essays which reflect the author's ideas on subjects ranging from the livable city and public housing to building design, public memorials, and the uses of public space.Modernism in architecture and urban design has failed the American city. This is the decisive conclusion that renowned public intellectual Nathan Glazer has drawn from two decades of writing and thinking about what this architectural movement will bequeath to future generations. In From a Cause to a Style, he proclaims his disappointment with modernism and its impact on the American city. Writing in the tradition of legendary American architectural critics Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, Glazer contends that modernism, this new urban form that signaled not just a radical revolution in style but a social ambition to enhance the conditions under which ordinary people lived, has fallen short on all counts. The articles and essays collected here--some never published before, all updated--reflect his ideas on subjects ranging from the livable city and public housing to building design, public memorials, and the uses of public space. Glazer, an undisputed giant among public intellectuals, is perhaps best known for his writings on ethnicity and social policy, where the unflinching honesty and independence of thought that he brought to bear on tough social questions has earned him respect from both the Left and the Right. Here, he challenges us to face some difficult truths about the public places that, for better or worse, define who we are as a society. From a Cause to a Style is an exhilarating and thought-provoking book that raises important questions about modernist architecture and the larger social aims it was supposed to have addressed-and those it has abandoned.