Author Description

"To many people, the idea of the functional city lost its former appeal after the seventies. There were good reasons for that, but the functional city is not something that will go away. To contemporary eyes, historic cities possess an enchanting and innocent beauty, but once they were fully functioning centres of craft and trade. Habitation, work and traffic are still the dominant factors in the structure of a city. The modern city is marked however by an unprecedented enlargement of scale. The idea of the functional city stems from the problems associated with this phenomenon. C. van Eesteren was no utopian, nor was he an architectural messiah. His lecture on the idea of the functional city in January 1928 was a down-to-earth appraisal of new design tasks that had so far been completely ignored. Now that the idea of the functional city is on the agenda again, it is interesting to examine why the pioneers of functionalism broke with the historicizing practices of their predecessors. Perhaps the choice they made was too radical. This book reconstructs the historic moment of that choice"--Bookjacket.