Shaping the Great City. Modern Architecture in Central Europe 1890-1937 [Architecture in Central Europe].

Munich1999/ Prestel/ first edition/ publisher's binding, cloth with wrapper/ text in English/ 24x30.5cm/s.262/ color and black and white illustrations in the text/ very good condition-, some dusting of upper page trim, edges of pages slightly yellowed

A collection of essays dealing with the 19th century architectural history of cities in the former Habsburg region. They cover cities such as Budapest, Prague, Vienna, Zagreb, Lviv, and Krakow. "As administrative centers of the empire, they had trans-local and even trans-national significance. To build in them meant not only shaping the space of contemporary urban life, but also engaging with the history of their intertwined structure. This book proposes that it was in the inhabited cities of the region that the conflicting aspirations of empire and people and the overlapping urban modernization and national autonomy gave shape to modern architectural culture, with deep roots in place and in the concept of the great city as a protagonist in the making of history."