Matrix of Man; An Illustrated History of Urban Environment

New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969. Third printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Format is approximately 9 inches by 10.25 inches. 317, [3] pages. Endpaper map. Illustrations. DJ has some wear, soiling, small tears and chips. Contents include Introduction, Geomorphic and Concentric Environments; Orthogonal Environment; The Greek Wave; The Orbit of Rome; Orthogonal Variations: The Linear Merchant Cities; Clusters and the End of Origins; Options: A Conclusion; Bibliographic Notes; and Index. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (born Drouth Maria Pauline Alice Sybille Pietzsch; October 29, 1903 - January 8, 1971) was an architectural and art historian. Originally a German citizen, she accompanied her second husband, the Hungarian Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, in his move to the United States. She was the author of a study of his work, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, plus several other books on architectural history. She was an outspoken critic of what she regarded as the excesses of postwar modernist architecture. After her death in 1971, fellow writer Ruiner Bantam eulogized her as "the most formidable of the group of lady-critics (Jane Jacob's, Ada Louise Huxtable, etc.) who kept the O.S. architectural establishment continually on the run during the 50s and 60s. One of her most important books, Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment, focused on the development of cities and the influence of landscape, climate, tradition, culture, and form. She made numerous contributions to architecture magazines, such as Architectural Forum and Progressive Architecture. She was one of the first critics to study postwar Latin American architecture in depth. This is a book about faith in the historical city. Although towns are inanimate, they assume the characteristics of their creators. Cities, like men, are embodiments of the past and mirages of unfulfilled dreams - but inevitably renew themselves unit by unit in a slow, time-bound metabolic process. City personality does not rest on material progress but on historical options faced by a specific town and no other. The current "urban crisis," and its pessimistic, self-destructive diagnosis, differs from previous environmental revolutions in its contextual misdirection. While the "hardheaded realists" are the planners and architects who know that man's reaction to his environment is largely rational, determined by purely emotional identifications with religion, wealth, education, art, amusement, charity, and family life. A history of urban origins is a history of design imagination. It is not mentioned in better scientific planning circles that man-made environment, whether good or mediocre, is the product of architecture, envisioning form-producing order.