“[Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities)] is really a masterpiece of great clarity, power, passion, and wit… [It was] like catnip to me, repelling the mosquitoes, cockroaches, and termites that invade the finest of houses.”
—Jonathan Cott, prolific author of Pipers at the Gates of Dawn

“Daniel Solomon…is a wonderful writer, with a quirky, far-ranging mind that can find a metaphor for city planning in the contrasting careers of Alice Waters and Julia Child.”
—Detroit Free Press on Global City Blues

“If only all architects could write as engagingly as Daniel Solomon!”
—Planning on Global City Blues

In Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities), this new short electronic-only publication from the Island Press E-ssentials program, Daniel Solomon, renowned architect and co-founder of the Congress for New Urbanism, presents a provocative critique of modern architecture and an engaging vision of what our cities could be.

For Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities), Solomon, whom the Detroit Free Press has called a “spectacularly gifted writer,” takes inspiration from creative giants like Coco Chanel and Vladimir Nabokov as well as architects and city planners to define his vision of a “continuous city.” This city, confronted by the choice between starting over from scratch and sprawling outward, instead chooses a third path: building upon and within itself, reaching toward the future while guided by the past.

From garden apartments in the Bronx to an Italian church carefully woven into an otherwise unprepossessing Roman intersection, he notes examples of the continuous city’s victories over the past few centuries. Along the way, he calls out architecture’s establishment, accusing them of stifling the sensitivity to a city’s unique personality that has given us some of our most appreciated buildings. From Rem Koolhaas’s authoritarian design for China’s Central Television Studio to the first two weeks of the Harvard Graduate School of Design curriculum, he argues that modernism embraces flawed, obsolete ideals at the cost of urban identity.

Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities) is a clarion call for putting context back into the architectural design process. It’s a path that can not only create more beautiful, invigorating public spaces, but also house growing populations in harmony with the environment.

Daniel Solomon, FAIA is an architect and urban designer whose 42-year career combines achievements in professional practice with academic pursuits of teaching and writing. He has been twice named to Architectural Digest's 100 Foremost Architects, worldwide, and is the recipient of the Seaside Prize for contributions to American Urbanism, the Maybeck Award from AIA California Council for lifetime achievement in design, and was named Housing Hero by the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition.

PRAISE FOR GLOBAL CITY BLUES:

“Global City Blues is one of the rare architecture books that will resonate with any thoughtful reader.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Dan Solomon is the most entertaining and literate of the ever-growing body of people who think the modernist city was a bad idea. This wise, readable book, filled with poignant anecdotes and memorable insights, illumines the way to a saner future.”
—Robert Campbell, architect and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic
 
“I think the values that inform the thesis of this amazing book are essential for creating a hopeful future for our cities.”
—Alice Waters, founder and director of Chez Panisse Foundation