Recommendations from our site
“Davis built on the history and arguments that Carey McWilliams proffered in An Island on the Land half a century earlier. City of Quartz, which was actually a PhD dissertation that he turned into book form, looks at all of Southern California’s issues, including water, and weaves them together into a road map for the 21st century, with lots of warning signs along the way. He was wary of air pollution and what would happen with the ever-increasing number of automobiles clogging the freeway system. Sadly, a lot of his predictions have come to pass.” Read more...
Dennis McDougal, Journalist
“Mike Davis is getting increasingly vociferous about development and climate change, and in a way this is one of his milder books. I found City of Quartz when I went to Los Angeles for first time. In its angry and political way, it describes how cities arise out of an incredibly complex and difficult set of uncontrollable forces. When I first arrived in Los Angles, before I read the book, I was completely and utterly bamboozled by the place. I was thinking what the hell is going on here? It wasn’t just to do with the freeways and the smog, and Hollywood – there was something very strange about it. Whilst I was there I picked up a copy of City of Quartz, which had just come out, and read it all in one session. It made sense of things; why the railways have gone and why freeways had proliferated for example (the railways in LA were brought up by a conglomerate made up of companies in the car industry, who just shut them down because they were competition, which in time meant the freeways popped up). It’s a book about understanding the relationship between the built and the un-built, the physical fabric and social fabric.” Read more...
The best books on The Context of Architecture
Jeremy Till, Architects & Architectural Historian
