Vishaan Chakrabarti is an architect based in New York City. He is the founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) and the author of two books.
His first book, published in 2013, was A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America. And as the title suggests, it was about the virtues of dense urban agglomerations. You know, the kind of cities that I like and have good bike lanes.
His second book, which just came out, is called The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy. In this one, he talks about the role of architecture and urbanism in fighting both climate change and social division.
Below is an excerpt from a recent interview in Bloomberg where he discusses the book's theme of "social friction." This snippet is also a timely follow-up to yesterday's post about autonomous vehicles:
Cars are problematic when it comes to connective design. It doesn’t matter if they’re electric because the problem with a car is it’s a divider. It’s a metal bubble and it keeps you from interacting with your neighbors. So the virtues of mass transit, public parks and well-designed buildings in cities are not just that they are good for the climate. They are also good for this sense of social coherence. If we’re going to live up to our promise as a country — a multicultural democracy — we need to have spaces that both reflect and perpetuate that.
I haven't read the book yet, but it sounds like it's in the wheelhouse of this blog. If you'd like to, here's a link.
A new architecture book, called Entryways of Milan, will be released next month that profiles some of the city’s most beautiful residential entryways. There are 144 of them and they are housed in buildings dating from 1920 to 1970. For a sneak peek of the architecture, click here.
What makes a book like this interesting is that these are private entryways, which means they are spaces that are largely overlooked within a city. They are the spaces that mediate between public (street) and private (residences). The book also dives into things like materials and the art-historical and social significance of each lobby.
I am now wondering if similar books or photography projects exist for other cities. I think it would be fascinating to compare residential entrance halls across different cities during the same time period. Although the above Milanese lobbies have set the bar pretty high.