Matrix of Man: An Illustrated History of Urban Environment

New York: Praeger, 1968. Reprint. Second printing, 1969. Hardcover. Good in good dust jacket. DJ has some wear, soiling, edge tears and chips. Minor page soiling.. 317 p. illus., maps, plans. 27 cm. Bibliographic Notes. Index. "This is a book about faith in the historical city, " writes the author. She presents the urban matrix of man not as a monument to the past but as a continuously self-creating human effort to shape an image of society and its collective aspirations. In contrast to the evolutionary theory of urban history, Mrs. Moholy-Nagy asserts that cities are not "overgrown villages, and citizens not yokels grown sophisticated. " From earliest times, urban life evolved from different premises. History was not made in villages but in cities-through the interaction of individuality, power structure, trade, and specialization-whose visual symbols were art and architecture. The glories and the failures, the urban virtues and the ancient urban vices, are shown with scholarship and humor to be timeless and ecumenical. From the vast panorama of urbanization, some 7, 000 years in the making, emerge key cities that share certain personality traits shaped by specific social and geographic conditions. Instead of a chronological and ethnic classification of urban history, the author presents archetypes that developed under related circumstances: geomorphic, concentric, orthogonal and modular plans, and their concomitant architecture, to which the twentieth century has added the intra-and ex-urban cluster.