The North Atlantic Cities Cites Row House Architecture as an Urban Savior

The Athenaeum was established in 1814 as a subscription library, at a time when the free public library system did not exist and collections of books, available for reading or research, were still mostly limited to institutions, schools or colleges.The Athenaeum of Philadelphia nurtures curiosity in members and neighbors, strengthening community through learning and discourse.The Athenaeum of Philadelphia is one of 16 membership libraries that collaborate through the Membership Libraries Group. Some, like the Charleston (est. 1748), New York Society (est. 1754), and Newport (est. 1741) libraries, date from the 18th Century.

Athenaeum of Philadelphia

Charles Duff is the author of "The North Atlantic Cities"

The North Atlantic Cities by Charles B. Duff is a book on urban development and urban life masquerading as a book on architecture. It is the story of four hundred years of architecture and urban development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland and the United States, particularly cities like New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, to name a few. 

The author starts with a kind of building few others have considered - the row house, which could very well be the key to understanding why many of the world’s great cities look and function as they do. From the 1600’s to today as the author theorizes, this innocuous-seeming housing type is perhaps the antidote to suburban sprawl, urban decay and the worst catastrophes of global climate change 
Charles Duff is a planner, teacher, developer, and historian. In a career of more than 35 years, he has built or rebuilt more than 300 buildings and led the revival of some of Baltimore’s most successful neighborhoods. He has been President of Jubilee Baltimore, the city’s premier community development nonprofit, since 1987, and has been President of the Baltimore Architecture Foundation. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard University, he lectures widely in America and elsewhere and has taught at Johns Hopkins University. He co-wrote Then and Now: Baltimore Architecture in 2005 and contributed to The Architecture of Baltimore. His translations of two French works on Greek tragedy were published in the US in 2010 and 2012. His book The North Atlantic Cities has just been published in the UK and is available in the US.Zoom information will be emailed the day of the event to the email address used during registration.

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