The Age of Spectacle. Adventures in Architecture and the City of the 21st Century

In Dubai, a luxurious residential building is constructed in the shape of a giant iPod. In Beijing, Herzog & de Meuron are erecting the "Bird's Nest" stadium. In Cincinnati, Zaha Hadid is being paid millions for designing a "landmark" building... in the hope that she will single-handedly change the fate of an entire region. "Star architects" are competing to design increasingly monumental, spectacular, and extravagant buildings that radically transform the surrounding landscape: Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Norman Foster's "The Gherkin," Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin... Over the past fifty years, a true revolution has taken place in the lives of our cities. Tom Dyckhoff (born 1971), a British architecture and urbanism critic, discusses its course and results with competence, flair, and humor. Exploring urban landscapes from New York to Beijing, from Bilbao to Astana, he shows that we are not merely witnessing the emergence of a new type of building: we are living in a period of fundamental transformation of how modern spaces function in entrepreneurial cities.