The Ideal City - Its Architectural Evolution in Europe

We've come a long way since the Tower of Babel, although Dr Rosenau remarks on the similarity of London University's Senate House to the Breughel painting of that ill-fated endeavour. But nowadays many of us inhabit megalopolises, haunted by the fear that they may soon become necropolises. City life is far from ideal, and the haphazard reality of the modern city is remote from the formal ideality depicted by generations of architects.

Dr Rosenau charts the tensions and interactions between real and ideal architecture from the Greeks to the present. Her revised edition is still a slim volume and is sometimes indigestibly encyclopaedic; many architects get only a few paragraphs, insufficient for the novice and unsatisfying for the expert. Her definition of an Ideal City is remarkably elastic at times, yet excludes post-revolutionary Soviet architecture completely. But the book's main strength lies in its author's synoptic vision and her exposition of the relation between philosophical ideals and architectural forms.