Monday 7 December 2015

Imaginary Cities

cov_imagincities2

And I finished Imaginary cities - wow, what can I say - this is one of the richest books I've read in a long time - it's so incredibly chewy though because every page you think - I don't know about that person, or that building, or that book, film, play, thing and spend half the time when you should be reading getting lost down a rabbithole of references. It took the author 15 years to write the book and I was lucky enough to meet him at the Future Cities festival in Bristol where I got to have a bit of a chat with him. Although I was only about a third of the way through at that point...

Taking Virilio's point - "The invention of the ship, was the invention of the shipwreck." The author posits that every dystopia is someone else's utopia and proceeds through almost 600 pages to explore this fascinating theme through history, architecture and story.

Reading this is a very rich experience and I have no hesitation in giving it 5 stars, even if it did take me about a month to read! (only because you can only read it in little gulps and take time to digest each magnificent morsel)



No comments:

Post a Comment

Search This Blog