Chicago is a young and dynamic city. Its rapid growth has made it a metropolis in a short time, and its relatively recent construction allows it to be known in a unique and special way. Its young age has also made it immensely famous compared to other cities, thanks to stories that have transcended borders.

Its inhabitants rightly claim Chicago’s second to none, because it has never been the first American city in anything –but not for lack of trying in the short period of its history–. It tried to surpass New York in population, but that desire soon gave way to the desire to be first in the world in courage, energy, and determination. Such is the ambition of the young metropolis, whose reputation has transcended its physical boundaries, achieving the status of muse in both prose and poetry. It's also had a profound influence on those who live in it; numerous writers, poets, and scholars have found inspiration in Chicago. And its influence has extended to all branches of art and science, shaping the literary background of the nation. In fact, it gave rise to an important all-purpose label: The Chicago School, present in every discipline.

The city's development was aided by its strategic location and access to major waterways and railroads. Chicago became a trading center and soon began to produce its own goods. The industrial growth attracted people from all over the world, resulting in a rapid increase in population. Over time, the city has asserted itself in an ever-expanding metropolitan area, and its fame, though often distorted and mellowed, has reached all corners of the world. This accumulation of qualities has contributed to its charm and, needless to say, to the creation of the Chicago myth.

To write a book that approaches the city from multiple perspectives, it was necessary to resort to creators as relevant to the city and as diverse as poet Carl Sandburg, urban planners Ludwig Hilberseimer and Jane Jacobs, architect Mies van der Rohe, political scientist Larry Bennett, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Mike Royko and Louis Stud Terkel.

The book’s index contains the three necessary points of view to study the nature of a city. Firstly, its history, divided into three phases, then its form and structures, and lastly its design –not the plans per se, but rather the problems encountered–. After the introduction, the second chapter deals with the origins of the city, with special attention to the difficulties and advantages of its location and situation. The third is devoted to planning, with special attention to Burnham and Bennet's 1908 plan and the leading figure of Frederick Law Olmsted. The fourth chapter focuses on the innovative construction that overcame the site's problems and developed a new aesthetic that gave rise to the renowned Chicago School of Architecture.

The fifth chapter is devoted to the peculiar style of governance that developed in the city beginning in the Roaring Twenties and continued for decades, with a personal focus on longtime mayors, organized crime gangsters, and civil rights leaders. Chicago cannot be understood without studying the figures of Al Capone or Martin Luther King. The sixth chapter focuses on art and artists and their presence in the city's streets, squares, gardens, and neighborhoods. Finally, the seventh chapter covers the most recent decades, indebted to this form of government, but with the city clearly oriented toward a more global presence in the world.

In short, Chicago is much more than a city. Its history, its industrial development, and its cultural diversity have turned it into a myth; and its urban planning, its regional vision, and the recognition of its key figures have become fundamental aspects for understanding and connecting the past, present, and future of this fascinating metropolis.

Reviews:
Así es Chicago. A City and its Myth. Alejandro Bernabéu, Arquitectura Viva. 01-05-2023
Chicago mola. Te contamos por qué. Marisu Moreno. El Plural. 17-05-2023
Chicago, la ciudad mítica que le “gusta a todos y se ha ganado todo a pulso”. Gabriel Morales. El Español.

There are many similarities and some differences in the arrival of the railway in Vancouver in 1887 and in Oakland-San Francisco in 1869. Both cities longed for its arrival, but what in San Francisco was a great improvement, in Vancouver it was an urgent necessity, due to the great difficulties of terrain and weather.

British Columbia occupies the southwest of the Canadian territory and is, in fact, a very rough terrain and then totally unknown. Getting from the prairies of Alberta to Vancouver requires traversing three mountain ranges, the Rockies, the Selkirk and the Coastal, a difficult trek in summer and impossible in winter.

In addition, the integration of British Columbia into Canada affected that enormous and unexplored space, during a long and turbulent time. The First Nations participated in it, established there since time immemorial, and some of the most powerful nations in the world, specifically Great Britain, France and Spain –with colonies in the American continent– and the brand new United States. The decisive moment of that turbulent time was October 28, 1790, when the Nootka Bay Agreement was signed in Madrid, and Spain, threatened with war by Great Britain, renounced its monopoly on navigation and trade in the Pacific so as not to face this war that Spain could not win.

After detailing this type of aspect in the introduction, the story of the book is structured around the authors of the explorations, conflicts, negotiations, projects and constructions that have been making possible and shaping the city, true protagonists of the action, often with autonomy in their decisions.

The second chapter describes the explorations of the Pacific coast by sea and by land, together with the incident that the British took as an excuse to raise the conflict, and its subsequent consequences for the colony of British Columbia, as well as for the primacy of the coast mainland over the islands to house the future Pacific port.

The third chapter is dedicated to the railway. Its arrival was a necessary and sufficient condition for the integration of British Columbia into Canada. In fact, the Canadian Pacific Railway was the one who decided and built the arrival port for the railway and chose the name of Vancouver for the city that would be built there. After a first part dedicated to the definition of the layout and the construction of the railway, the second reflects the preparations and consequences of that arrival. As in the previous one, the chapter is organized according to the protagonists of each stage.

The fourth chapter studies in detail the ideas that shaped the city. At the end of World War II, Vancouver had not yet turned a century, but the citizens managed to be listened to in the implementation of the new. A group of sensitive planners knew how to develop consultation and participation procedures that, for a few years, made it possible to solve the problems that arose. The development of Vancouver's wide waterfront is treated with special interest. Once again, people lead the sections, accompanied by the facet or quality of the city for which they fought.

Citizens are the protagonists of the fifth and final chapter. It is structured around the achievements and difficulties of the city itself with respect to values and ideas that are today understood as desirable: Vancouver is intended and presented as green, habitable and with sustainable mobility. And here entry is given to the assessment received by the city compared to other cities in the world, an assessment in which it has lost position in recent years.

Getting to Vancouver is not easy and, therefore, each chapter marks an arrival that changes the city of the moment and projects it into the future. In the second, dedicated to the explorers, the Europeans arrive; in the third, about the railway, it is Canada itself that arrives in Vancouver; in the fourth, dedicated to planners, modernity and its complexities arrive; and in the fifth, the citizens themselves see the whole world arrive.

Like most of the big cities in the world, Vancouver could not be visited for many months due to the pandemic, which has made more difficult to get to know the city. Between September and October 2021, this deficiency was corrected and, as always, practically all the photographs in this book have been taken by the author and his collaborators.

Vancouver is a green and well-maintained city, with a magnificent environment that deserves to be enjoyed.

Reseñas

An added surprise is that this city-port is very far from the sea. To reach Hamburg ships have to travel about 130 km on the Elbe River. But what appears to be a weakness turns out to be a strength because, going upriver, the port reaches all of inland Europe through its extensive canal network. From there, Hamburg was able to build an enormous external network of trade relations with hundreds of overseas ports, to become the 'door to the world' of the European internal network. Its "maritime" façade was made up of large ships capable of crossing the Atlantic with passengers and goods. Its "river" rear, located upstream, were the barges that could reach the large Central European cities.

The management of this complex commercial system was exercised by the shipping companies of the great bourgeois families, whose prominent men were in charge of managing their companies in the morning and the government of the city in the afternoon.

From this story, the question arises: how has this reality been kept alive until today. Other great ports have become extinct, or have put land through the city where they were born.

Hamburg's millenary trajectory is not linear. It presents twists and turns that are the result of decisions and responses to unforeseen or desired events. For centuries, the port has made the city grow, but it has also been its weak point, as much of its problems came through the port or were aggravated by its presence.

In addition to the 1943 bombings that completely destroyed Hamburg, here much greater than in other cities in proportion to their inhabitants because it was about ruining the port, there were four great events or calamities, but Hamburg knew how to turn them into improvements: the demolition of the walls in the 1830s, the great fire of 1842, the customs union of 1888 and the cholera epidemic of 1892.

The city-port has remained alive in its initial will to trade in the world, thanks to the orientation of its responses to these calamities, with great resilience. In turn, the main port city of Germany has housed a great school of humanistic studies, an exporter of ideas and talent to the entire world. The Aby Warburg circle and the University of Hamburg are outstanding examples of this.

The most persistent agent of change has been and continues to be port technology, especially in the last 50 years. The city decided in 2000 to move south with the HafenCity project to occupy the spaces abandoned by the container revolution, betting on moving the city's cultural center there and keeping the geometry of the complex edge of the water intact. At the forefront of all this was the most emblematic building, the new Elbphilharmonie, the current emblem of the city.

After the introduction of Chapter 1, Chapter 2 is dedicated to the scope and consequences for the city of the maritime trade that projected it towards the world, with its networks of external and internal influence -with special attention to the Central European channels-, and institutional, in the context of other maritime cities of the Baltic and the North Sea. Likewise, a comparison is made with other European ports, analyzing quantitative variables from the CORINE database with landscape ecology techniques.

Chapter 3 explains the influence of the port on the growth and formation of the city, when the foreign network begins its expansion and the Hamburg shipping companies become present throughout the world. The port makes the city grow and prints its stamp throughout the 19th century. The role of the great shipping families in the city's government and in civic institutions is also analyzed, along with the changes that the Weimar Republic brought to the city's architecture and design. While the port is constantly expanding and renovating its wharves, docks and warehouses, the famous Speicherstadt, or red brick warehouse district over the canals, the first metal bridges, the tunnel under the river and the extensive railway that already enters in the city with several stations.

Chapter 4 reviews the great calamities that befell the city and the changes brought about in its recovery, including the 1943 bombing raids that completely destroyed it. The port extends along the banks of the Elbe, and integrates new population centers in Greater Hamburg.

Chapter 5 deals with the last great transformation of the city, which began in the 1990s with the HafenCity project and its exemplary planning, design and construction process. To understand the cultural commitment, the important background of the city in music, art and image is introduced, with a review of the main museums, theaters and auditoriums, to finish with the great Elbphilharmonie, built by the ACS Group .

Hamburg is a city not very well known but with great attraction, which is multiplied by the latest achievements of HafenCity and the Elbphilharmonie. There is much to learn in the city and its port, and to enjoy it.

Reseñas
Hamburgo, una ciudad volcada al mar. El Independiente. 4-2-2021
Perderse en Hamburgo, la ciudad-puerto a 130 km. del mar. elplural.4-3-2021
Hamburgo junto al agua, Alejandro Bernabeu, ArquitecturaViva 233 2021 59

If the river appears to us as an engineering territory, with its canals, dams, bridges and hydroelectric stations, the city of Toronto is the site of new and interesting transport policies and urban approaches to guide and control its growth. In Chapter 1, the introduction to this book, we analyze the strategic location of Toronto regarding resources, communications, and its political neighbors; how it has designed a transitable urban fabric where the car coexists with public transport to bring the periphery and the center closer together; how it improves and conditions its site on the shore to coexist with the lake in a sustainable manner; and why it aims for the center of these advantages to grow in a habitable way and enjoy full vitality, enhancing its attraction. These four adjectives are dealt with in the chapters following this introduction.

Chapter 2 reflects the importance of the St. Lawrence River in the origin and growth of both the country and the city of Toronto. The river and the Great Lakes, where it widens, constitute the largest freshwater reserve in the world, storing one third of its total, and are the primary source of natural resources for the entire territory east of the Continental Divide, the watershed between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The communication between the most important Canadian cities by sea, by means of the Seaway made possible by the river, became something to be preserved at all costs. With the Anglo-American war the border sections of the river became dangerous and it was necessary to build an important system of channels to avoid them.

In addition, hydroelectric power stations were built to take advantage of the enormous flows that run along the steps and rapids of the Saint Lawrence river Toronto was able to take advantage of its central location on the river to become the largest and best connected city in Canada, first with the canals, then with the railways, and later on with the airports, which operate more connections to other cities in the world than those in any other Canadian city.

Chapter 3 looks at the changes that occurred when trains replaced ships to move around the country, inducing a strong push for city growth and major technological innovations in mobility.

The emergence of the railroad reduced the influence of the St. Lawrence River on Toronto's life, as it was no longer essential as a communication route and could be crossed, mostly close to the main cities, thanks to the new suspension bridge technology. Soon after, the automobile became the protagonist of transport, both in the city and in the territory. Its rapid acceptance required better and larger roads, which for reasons of safety and capacity became highways.

In Toronto the highways emerged late and people knew how to oppose them, managing to preserve the original grid. As a result, two policies were adopted to balance mobility without the highways. On the one hand, public transport was promoted with the Metro, in close coordination with trams and buses in some stations transformed into interchanges. On the other hand, it was decided to channel growth by increasing the density in the center and certain selected areas: growth was only allowed where there was sufficient public transport. The implementation of these policies led to the abandonment of segregated housing and office zoning in favor of hybrid or mixed use.

Chapter 4 discusses Toronto's relationship with water, but now in environmental terms. With its way of growing, the city managed to maintain mobility in acceptable terms, but neglected the environmental effects of the logical increase in population. In particular, the discharge of wastewater into the lake, both because of the persistence of old direct discharge sewers, and because of the scarcity of facilities to collect rainwater runoff.

Heavy rainfall floods the streets, washing non-degradable toxic products into the world's largest natural water reserve and forces permanent dredging at the port, extracting hazardous waste that must be deposited in controlled landfills.

For many decades, an industrial and railway barrier prevented the city from seeing the lake. The city ended up on the tracks, and between them and the port there were only a few industries. In the 1970s the container revolution made the port obsolete in a few years, and the city started to recover its relationship with the lake, rebuilding its battered Waterfront in a lengthy operation that radically transformed its neighborhoods and priorities.

Toronto also regained its relationship with the St. Lawrence River, privileged because of its central position on its Canadian shore, between Niagara Falls, visited by 30 million visitors every year, and Kingston's Thousand Islands, which are on the way. Finally, Chapter 5 looks at the city's way of life, networks, space and built forms. It tries to understand the enormous effort of planning, policies and programs carried out by the city in order to become more habitable, becoming a pioneer of a series of urban development practices of great interest. Practices that insist, above all, on the influence of the form of environments built according to the behavior of citizens. By intensifying the density in the Downtown and concentrating growth near transport in the suburbs, it is essential to improve the experience of the user of the resulting fabric. And Toronto is implementing this with new types of buildings and layouts, based on hybrid or mixed use of indoor and outdoor spaces. The tower remains the essential element, but it houses a variety of functions at its base or podium to enhance the vitality of the urban experience.

The design of the streets is oriented to pedestrian use because, although it assumes the inevitability of cars, it reduces their priority or preeminence over other modes of transport so common elsewhere. The cold and wind of the long Nordic winter are countered by an underground network of passages and atriums that connect the main buildings of the city, while the design of large open spaces that are uninhabitable with strong winds is avoided, and sunny spaces are promoted.

Apart from the well-known CN Tower, there are no icons or visual references with which to identify or recognize the attributes of this city, but there is no need for them because the people, the trams, the shops and restaurants, and even the cars – everything that fills its streets, is friendly. Toronto is lived in and used by a heterogeneous population where races, cultures and languages coexist in perfect harmony, and it has demonstrated an enviable capacity for welcoming people.

Toronto is a city full of attractions, although not very well known and not easy to understand. But you don't have to understand it to enjoy your visit and let yourself be carried away by its vitality: it just requires a little more time to be able to walk around it without being in a hurry. If you decide to spend a few days there, you'll certainly do so again as soon as you can.

Book Reviews
Toronto, la metrópoli abierta y amigable que hizo grande Canadá. El Español
Toronto: una arquitectura modélica con una perfecta armonía entre lo antiguo y lo nuevo. ok diario 11-02-2020
Toronto, de la A a la Z. El Independiente. 2-2-2020
Un recorrido por Toronto y Canadá de la mano de Miguel Aguiló. El Plural.

La construción de Canadá en Toronto desde los extremos del rio San Lorenzo. Revista LEER, n 295, Otoño-Invierno 2019 p.37

In these two and a half centuries the city has evolved at a dizzying rate to become one of the most dynamic, innovative and welcoming metropolis in the world. A trajectory that began with the Mission built by the Spanish Franciscans in 1776, and continued with the economic expansion of the 19th century thanks to the suitability of its port for commercial traffic and the impact of the gold rush in the second half of the century. The industrialization and modernization of the city during the 20th century was supported by the establishment of important military bases, the development of leading university centers such as Stanford and Berkeley, and the construction of major infrastructure, whose maximum exponent is the Golden Gate Bridge built in the 1930s.

In recent decades, the economic strength of the city and its metropolitan area has come from the new technology sector, which is rooted in Silicon Valley, and whose influence has been decisive in making San Francisco a world reference for the most advanced industries and the most avant-garde arts.

Although it was born very late, the city has experienced with similar intensity strong moments of destruction, the well-known occurrence of fires and earthquakes that destroy what has been made and force its reconstruction every now and then, and great creative stages, in which a permanent commitment of improvement is always manifested that, at the same time, shapes or touches the vision of how the city should be. But, to its inhabitants, San Francisco is not just the city. In fact, they refer to it as the City by the Bay, and prefer to say "Center" or "Downtown" when talking about the compact area.

The story of the construction of St. Francis unfolds in the book with a structure that is in turn composed of stories. The titles of the four chapters are chained to the introduction to be combined in a first story-summary: An unavoidable destination turned into a city with a grid on hills to fix the disorder, on the edge of an extensive bay that it makes its own with piers and bridges, combining density and dispersion from the culture of the diverse, taking on digital and remaining City by the Bay. The sections of each chapter compose a new story, as do the "sidebars" that accompany the text in the margins.

Chapter 2 deals with the grid, as San Francisco's first truly characteristic and shaping built element. Its long streets are supported directly on a topography of hills forming a very rigid grid, extended to all the peninsula but designed when there were only a handful of houses.

Chapter 3 recovers the bay and recounts its "construction" as a geographical entity based on bridges, which make up the arterial fabric of the territory, and docks that formalize the port of the future capital of the Pacific. The port attracted different cultures and placed the city in the world through the Universal Expositions. But the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor radically altered that future and turned the industrial zone into a supply machine, the bay into a huge shipyard of warships and the city into a warehouse of people torn apart by war.

Chapter 4 explains how the city had to recover the maritime front, which was rendered obsolete by the container revolution, and had to create a new mobility. On the other hand, great protests paralyzed a series of proposals for high housing towers, managing to save the character of the neighborhoods. The city attracts beatniks, hippies, antimilitarists, black panthers, and other alternative cultures, which reinforce protest movements. And their presence links the physical city with an alternative way of life, making San Francisco the world capital of counterculture.

Chapter 5 tells of the city's struggle to maintain its vision in the midst of the great changes of the 1990s digital revolution, located around Silicon Valley and the downtown skyscrapers.

This book is about a city that is, above all, a story of itself. It is published with the hope that it will encourage the reader to visit the city.

Book Reviews
EP Brands: La obstinada construcción de San Francisco. El Plural, 5/03/2019.
La obstinada construcción de San Francisco. El Independiente, 9/01/2019.
Bernabeu, Alejandro: Ciudad fénix. Arquitectura Viva, 211. Madrid, 2019, p.51.
Morales, Gabriel: La obstinada construcción de San Francisco, la ciudad imposible. El Español.

London embodies the impotence of theory to explain the city or attempt to predict or channel its growth. And since the aim is to penetrate today's city, the first task is to decide where this narrative should begin. Although defining a point of departure is necessarily an arbitrary decision, this book 'had to' start in 1848. Many a study deems that the so-called Second Industrial Revolution began in 1850 and came to an end in 1914. Eric Hobsbawm contended that 'Only one economy was effectively industrialised by 1848, the British, and consequently dominated the world'.

The book distinguishes four major eras from that year to the present. A subject closely related to construction is discussed in each, focusing on a specific built element, although background and implications are also addressed and other pertinent subjects are mentioned. The text is arranged around revolution, empire, modernity and globalisation, the themes prevailing in the titles of four of Eric Hobsbawm's books, although the order of the sequence varies to analyse the effects of these developments on the construction of London. The introduction is followed by a chapter on the effects of the Industrial Revolution, focusing on the railroad as the backbone of mobility and illustrating the cardinal importance of the railway station for the city. The third chapter discusses the legacy of empire, taking the river as the city's origin and frontier, a boulevard where wharfs and bridges generate a built landscape as essential to the city's smooth operation as it is to its imagery. These constructions recovered the river as a passageway. Their multiple presence and operation afforded them a central role in drainage for London as a whole, which subsequently served as a model in all large western cities. The fourth chapter studies modernist inter-war proposals that materialised in the aesthetics and use of city streets. The fifth addresses London's present status as a global city seeking higher sprawl-free density, redirecting its energies to financial, leisure time and tourist services accessible to the entire wold via telecommunications and air travel. The sixth chapter describes recent ACS works in the city.

Although routinely regarded as polycentric, London has a clearly defined urban core delimited by a belt of railway stations interconnected by the city's underground Circle Line. Whilst the tracks are not visible and the stations are camouflaged behind the façades of large hotels, their interiors are conspicuous for their everyday use and their status as reference points on the famous tube map that governs the city's spatial image. London, too vast to be assimilated, is addictive: the more intensely it is explored, the more city is left to discover and the more attractive it becomes.

Interview

Crítica

Martínez, Borja: "La reinvención de Londres". Revista Leer, año XXXIII, nº 288, diciembre 2017- enero 2018, p. 48-49.

Sydney is the handsome fruit of a difficult country's sorrowful history: a charming but fragile landscape in delicate balance between a boundless ocean and a vast desert, a peculiar erosive formation over a relatively soft sandstone terrain, with coves inside coves that enlarge a shoreline characterised by scantly developed, barely arable soils.

The outcome of a little over two hundred years of history includes, among many others, nearly five million people in an enormous area rife with single-family housing; an intricate, multi-coved bay with homes clustering on its shores; a city core consisting in a sheaf of skyscrapers that tend to invade all the available space; a coast studded with beaches as stunning as they are proud of their early establishment as public spaces; and a culture of seafaring recreation in the form of all manner of craft and sports, a decisive component of the Australian identity.

The introductory chapter of this book is followed by reflection on the ideas of distance and beauty, from exploratory voyages to the earliest inklings of what would become a city. Far from the paradise initially promised, that land, fathered by voyagers with a background of imprisonment, had to make a strenuous effort to build a colony populated only by sailors, soldiers and prisoners.

The third chapter narrates how all that began to change. The penitentiary culture weakened as sentences were served out and the colonists', pervaded by an overpowering sense of freedom, firmly refused to accept more convicts. Plans were drawn for water supply and drainage systems, roads and new streets; the first institutional buildings were erected and above it all, Australia's newly instituted citizenry discovered its penchant for the sea and started to take measures to ensure its public use.

The fourth chapter deals directly with the construction of the city, from the principles and criteria that informed its planning to the construction of the major public works that have become its permanent benchmarks. Examples of that endeavour include the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Circular Quay, key elements in the city's relationship to its port.

The fifth chapter addresses Sydney's many-faceted transformation in the last third of the twentieth century. Modernity permeated the city, which grew inordinately in height while crowning the automobile as indispensable monarch of mobility. A prolific discussion of the conception and complex birth of the Opera House gives way to an ode to its important role in the city's and the country's image. The sixth chapter describes recent ACS works in Sydney.

Berlin is unmistakable from the air. Its planarity, free of high-rises, significant silhouettes or reference points, is conspicuous when seen from above. Its urban plan prevails. There are no mountains. Constant in depth and height, its buildings vary in length only and are arranged into large, irregular blocks around one or several inner courtyards.

Berlin was destroyed by air-borne fire. Protracted over decades of division, that destruction was redressed by a reconstructive undertaking intended to fan the embers of memory. A few monuments retain the memory of particularly devastating episodes. The vestiges of the damage, adopting the form of voids and frontiers, are eloquent even today.

In Berlin, water is visible in rivers, canals and lakes, soaking the soil and sustaining meadows, trees and forests. Water abounds in wetlands, meadows, trees and forests everywhere. So much surface water hinders both high-rise and underground construction: the city has few towers, no skyscrapers, very few tunnels and many short-span bridges. Its networks of public spaces are supplemented by a bevy of finely designed or rustic but always open and accessible parks.

The earth explains Berlin's outward growth. The city combines the pride of metropolis with an appetite for a serene lifestyle. Berliners enjoy gardening and visiting the forests and river banks in their surrounds on foot, by bike, car or train, depending on the distance to be covered (commuting, on outings or for evening entertainment). That practice brings the city closer to its inhabitants and highlights their relationship to the earth.

The four primary elements, each associated in some way with a certain moment in the progressively intense rapprochement to the city, are the components around which this book is structured.

It concludes with a description of ACS's recent works in the city.

The book begins with a general reflection on the city's tense and unending construction. The emergence of novelty, modernity, the metropolitan conceit, the recourse to art, the prevalence of public space, the indivisible link between construction and destruction, the conflicts of scale, the park as progression, the pomposity of the world corporate, the strength of the boroughs or the pulse of the crisis are essential to the life of and imperative to understanding the city.

That general narrative serves as the backdrop for the accomplishments of the book's 14 protagonists. Chapter 3 condenses the nineteenth century structuring that readied the city for its imminent growth around the person of John B. Jervis. In Chapter 4, John A. Roebling symbolises a new approach, materialised in the Brooklyn Bridge and the Flatiron Building. Chapter 5 features Frederick Law Olmsted, well-known author of Central Park and a whole system of parks and communication networks. McKim, Mead & White, the firm that authored many of Manhattan's institutional buildings, stands at the core of the sixth chapter. Chapters 7 and 8 introduce the mass transit flows generated by agglomeration, first describing William J Wilgus's role in railway construction and then Thomas Adams's in planning. The city started to colonise its subsoil with tunnels, trains and subways, visible above ground only in its exceptional Grand Central Station. Chapter 9 focuses on Wallace K. Harrison, who piloted corporate leadership as a substitute for the presence of institutions in the image projected by New York. The city grew taller with its emblematic skyscrapers, the Empire State Building and the Rockefeller Center. Chapter 10 proposes serene critical reflection on the person of Lewis Mumford after the 1929 financial crisis. Chapters 11 and 12, reviewing the expansive effects of the New Deal in surmounting that crisis, revolve around Robert Moses, Othmar Ammann and the Cross Manhattan Expressway, the emblematic fruit of their joint endeavour. Chapter 13 is devoted to Austin Tobin, who fathered the New York & New Jersey Port Authority. Chapter 14 takes Jane Jacobs as its central figure, a woman able to coordinate popular opposition to and halt potentially destructive initiatives in certain neighbourhoods, such as the Village or SoHo, exemplifying a philosophy of how to live in the city. Chapter 15 is a compilation of the splendid and contradictory construction that characterised an age, describing the controversial person of Philip Johnson and his antithesis, the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), as well as the reputed architects' works such as the United Nations, the Lincoln Center and the Ford Foundation or scenarios such as Times Square. In Chapter 16, the person chosen to synthesise the city's recent construction history is Amanda Burden, tireless driver of the new spirit internalised by the city to reinvent itself after a tragedy, several disasters and a persistent crisis. New or recovered elements such as the High Line invigorate the city alongside structures authored by architects of renown: Frank Ghery, Jean Nouvel and Christian de Portzamparc.

That historical review is supplemented by a chapter geared to the reader, with suggestions on four ways to broach the city, through its boulevards, courtyards, parks and scenarios.

A final chapter discusses ACS's most significant works around the world and in the United States in particular.

The built product, the architectural or engineering work, is one of life's essentials. Transcending its purpose, it constitutes an image of things to come: while constructed in space it is bound to time, which changes the demands that define the functions of human construction.

Legislation, regulations and urban planning aside, cities are the outcome of the sustained efforts of many professionals engaging in their transformation and functional viability. The voices of those who play the lead role in the process should be heeded to understand how a cities are made and changed. But each city is unique and calls for a specific approach to its mysteries. The author's familiarity with Madrid, the reason for choosing it as the subject of this book, is at the same time an obstacle to be surmounted. In light of the vast literature on the city and its construction, the topics and works around which the discourse revolves must be chosen carefully and the most suitable bibliographic references selected to address its necessarily schematic content.

The text is divided into nine chapters. A brief introduction is followed by a chapter devoted to construction that sketches the transformation of pre-existing urban elements that mark the boundaries to be honoured by today's builders. Chapters 2 to 6 deal with the measures designed to ensure mobility across streets and roads, encourage upward structural growth, straddle obstacles with bridges and regulate the flow of water and resources. A chapter entitled 'Using and enjoying the city' synthesises the preceding text, arguing that the 'unbuilt' landscape is intrinsic to Madrid's construction.

The book concludes with a catalogue of ACS's works, a list of references and a series of indexes.