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Nationalität
USA
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USA
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journalist
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Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
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Anthony Flint is a fellow and director of public affairs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and author of Modern Man: The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow, a narrative nonfiction account of the father of modern architecture (November 2014).

He is also author of Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City (Random House 2009) and This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America (Johns Hopkins University Press 2006), and co-editor of Smart Growth Policies: An Evaluation of Programs and Outcomes (Lincoln Institute 2009). He has been a journalist for over 30 years, primarily at The Boston Globe, a policy advisor on smart growth for Massachusetts state government, and a visiting scholar and Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He is a regular contributor to CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities), as well as The Boston Globe, The New Republic, GlobalPost, Next City, Metropolis, Planning magazine, Planetizen, Citiwire, Architecture Boston, and many other publications; author of the blogs At Lincoln House, Developing Stories and This Land; and a curator and speaker at TEDxBeaconStreet and TEDxTampaBay. In 2013 he was awarded fellowships at The Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center and The American Library in Paris. Wrestling with Moses won a Christopher Award in 2010.

http://www.anthonyflint.net/

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Did you ever read a book that you just wanted to end so you could get on with the next one? This is well-written and interesting enough that I continued reading it, but it took much longer than I would have liked.
 
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cwcoxjr | 3 weitere Rezensionen | Sep 5, 2019 |
I think this is of somewhat limited interest. It would have been much better as a magazine article (or as a chapter in "The Power Broker"!). Jane Jacobs had good ideas, countering modernism in urban redevelopment. She also perhaps started modern NIMBYism, and it is disappointing that Flint doesn't wrestle with this aspect of her legacy. Instead, Flint largely sees unattainable housing prices as a good thing, evidence that Jacobs's vision was highly desirable. Repeatedly, Flint cites the fact that the Greenwich Village neighborhood is now priced for celebrities and designer boutiques as a *good thing*. "The Power Broker" gives a better portrait of Moses.… (mehr)
 
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breic | 3 weitere Rezensionen | Jan 12, 2019 |
Master or Monster?
In Antony Flint’s very engaging biography of Le Corbusier, the modernist architect is a mixture of awesome design and horrible misconceptions, of fabulous jetsetting and rude, crude, bullying relationships. Le Corbusier rose to fame fast, but it did not outlive him. His designs were straightforward rectangles for the most part, with spare walls, slitty windows and amenities only he would appreciate, like Frank Lloyd Wright did in his designs. And like FLW, who refused to meet him, you inhabited a Le Corbusier space; it wasn’t yours.

Dealing with the man was no treat. As Time Magazine said in its 1961 cover story, he was “moody, and difficult and resentful, holding on to grudges, and with a penchant for firing his staff”. Employees worked all nighters only to be blasted in the late morning when Le Corbusier strode in from hours of painting. He recognized his brutality, but said “I feel it essential in architecture to be this way.” His arrogance did not often pay. On his first trip to the US in 1936, he was miffed that there wasn’t a battalion of photographers waiting dockside for the historic moment of him setting foot on American soil. After 34 days of giving lectures, he returned to France – without a single commission to show for it.

His personal life was no better. He married a beautiful model and basically abandoned her while he had affairs all over the world. He kept them secret from her, but wrote down and sent all the fine details – to his mother. He and his wife fought over décor, as the architect wanted a totally spare look, while his wife wanted color and furnishings. It is no great surprise she drank herself to death (on Pastis). During the occupation of France, he saw the writing on the wall and moved to Vichy to collaborate with the Germans. This did nothing for his personal relationships and it is amazing he escaped prosecution both formal and informal.

He had a long string of successes, and fortunately for the world, he did not get to gut and make over the center of Paris with his dense apartment buildings raised one floor above grade, wide, inhospitable boulevards out the windows and every amenity in its personal place. That was his basic model and he tried to implement all over the world. His Swiss fussiness (Flint uses the perfect word Calvinist) showed in his designs and in his own life. Imposing it on Paris would have been fatal. It was nearly fatal in New York, where Robert Moses glommed onto those ideas, and unfortunately, also had the power to implement them. The sad result was The Projects and endless elevated highways lifted directly from Le Corbusier. It took Jane Jacobs and thousands of New Yorkers to save the city from this modernist nightmare.

The book is not strictly a timeline. Suddenly, the young man who was struggling, is the owner of a state of the art Voisin car. Twenty pages later it turns out his father, a watchmaker in a rich watchmaking Swiss town, was able to steer some commissions his way, and that’s what launched his career. Flint organizes by project rather than decade, so there is overlap and back and forth involved. One thing that became annoying was the lack of photos. Flint spends a great deal of necessary effort describing buildings, amenities, elements, designs and environs, when a simple photo would do it all and put it in perspective. This is most definitely a book to read with an image search engine within reach at all times. In a biography so rich in visual concepts, not including any is bizarre.
… (mehr)
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DavidWineberg | Jul 17, 2014 |
Great Backgrounder

This is a decently written non-fictional work about the well publicized battles between the quintessential modernist Robert Moses and his arch-nemesis and modernism's grandest critic in Jane Jacobs. Although Anthony Flint offers no new analytical insight into modernism, Flint does a good job in weaving in between stories to deliver a well-written biography.

Written to the level of the average reader, I am sure this book will be of interest to anyone studying postwar urban development.… (mehr)
 
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bruchu | 3 weitere Rezensionen | Oct 11, 2009 |

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