The Age of Spectacle Adventures in Architecture and the 21st-Century City | Tom Dyckhoff

Exploring cityscapes from New York to Beijing, and from Bilbao to Portsmouth, this title shows that we are not just witnessing a new kind of building: we are living through a fundamental transformation in how our urban spaces work.

The corporate explosion of the last few decades has fundamentally shifted the relationship between architects, politicians and cities' inhabitants, fostering innovative new kinds of engineering and design, but also facilitating ill-conceived vanity projects and commercial power-grabs. Timely, passionate and bursting with new ideas, The Age of Spectacle is both an examination of how twenty-first century cities work, and a manifesto for a radically new kind of urbanism. Our cities, Dyckhoff shows, can thrive in the age of spectacle - but only if they engage us not just with dazzling structures, but by responding to the needs of the people who inhabit them.