An informative introduction to supertalls and the global cities where they rise above the skyline.
An architect and urban designer reflects on the technological innovations that have enabled the construction of “supertalls” and on the advances in urbanism that help mitigate their environmental shortcomings.
Al, the author of The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream, is highly knowledgeable about his subject, even if he is conflicted. He claims that “tall buildings are an integral part of urban living for the future” but describes supertalls—skyscrapers that exceed 300 meters in height—as “gas-guzzling Hummers on steroids” and “makers of increased inequity and societal risk.” While shorter skyscrapers “have significant environmental benefits,” buildings like the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, One57 in New York City, the Shanghai Tower, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (the world’s tallest building) mostly create environmental costs and “alienate people from nature.” Ostensibly made necessary by urban densities that send land values soaring, supertalls only became feasible with technological advances in structural material (especially, high-performance concrete); building shapes that dampen sway and lessen the vortexes created by high winds; safer and faster elevators that ease vertical movement; and innovations in air conditioning that compensate for inoperable windows and expansive glass facades. Technology, Al proposes, is also the solution to the environmental and urban problems generated by supertalls. Green infrastructure, mass transit, passive solar design, and zoning that allows for mixed-use districts are just a few of his recommendations. Yet, further expressing his ambivalence, the author writes, “technological progress doesn’t always lead to human progress.” Consequently, when he announces that “we are witnessing another golden age…the era of ‘supertalls,’ ” some readers may be unconvinced. Although he addresses a wide array of topics, Al could have written more about the financial feasibility of supertalls, the architectural design challenges they pose, the experiences of users, and the impacts these buildings have on surrounding residential and office markets.
An informative introduction to supertalls and the global cities where they rise above the skyline.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-00641-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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