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Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, by Richard Sennett. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. 448 pp. $27.50 cloth. ISBN: 0-393-03684-7.
When the Roman emperor Hadrian sent his plans for the Temple of Venus and Roma to the architect Apollodorus for approval, Apollodorus criticized the technical construction and proportions of the building and its statues. Hadrian promptly murdered Apollodorus. This anecdote in chapter 3 of Flesh and Stone is meant to illustrate the consequences of challenging an emperor's claim to legitimacy through architecture that symbolically united him with the people of Rome. While Sennett does not propose killing all the architects for creating sterile cities, he does ask why they have lost an active connection to the human body in their designs.
Flesh and Stone is an attempt to answer that question by examining the relationship between ideas about the body and the shape and experience of urban spaces. Sennett locates the problems of architecture (and urban planning) in collective fears about the body, fears that have contributed to the desensitization about the environment. The Athenian (male) citizen traversed his city naked in a celebration of the harmony between flesh and stone. People now travel inside cars, buses, and subways and are insulated from the city and from each other in ways that pedestrians in ancient cities were not. Engineers have constructed a new geography of speed that creates "passive freedom" from the necessity to exert energy in getting from one place to another.
If engineers create the potential for floating bodies...