Reviews

Three European capitalsLondon, Paris and Viennawere each deliberately conceived as a unified work of art, designed by 19th century planners and architects to reinforce dominant classes' values and serve their leisure pursuits. With this provocative thesis, Vassar history professor Olsen opens new vistas on urban environments in a delightful and gripping, richly illustrated social history. London's Regent Street served simultaneously as a north-south route to relieve traffic congestion and a stage set for the wealthy to display their clothes; its completion drove up rents by one-third. Louis Napoleon's radical surgery on Paris gave it a look of standardized regularity, but Olsen disputes the popular view that the aim was to prevent Parisian uprisings by breaking up working-class districts. The laying out of Vienna's Ringstrasse attracted Austria's upper-middle class to the capital where they could flaunt their fashion, art and money in a city that installed adequate sewage systems and gas lighting decades after other capitals. (September)

A sweeping comparative analysis of three great European metropolises in the 19th century, equally concerned with ordinary social life and monumental civic life. Olsen, author of two earlier books on the growth of London, mines with a cultivated air an English vein of writing about architecture, rendering his subject matter as a document of history and society and scattering drawing room references to T.S. Eliot and Edith Wharton. He interprets the city not as a department store of bourgeois consumption, the ``product'' of industrialization, but rather as a vessel of civilization itself, a theater of historicist consciousness. This is a major statement on the 19th-century city, destined to be a landmark in the fields of urban and planning history. Peter S. Kaufman, Suffolk Community Coll. Lib., Selden, N.Y.