For our February HRC meeting, we welcome planner, teacher, real estate developer and historian Charles B. Duff, to discuss his recent book, The North Atlantic Cities. This is a book on urban development and urban life masquerading as a book on architecture -- the story of four hundred years of architecture and urban development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland and the United States. Amsterdam, Delft, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bath, London, New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore and Savannah are just a sampling of the cities Mr. Duff explored.
The author focuses on a building type few others have considered – the row house, as a key to understanding why many of the world’s great cities look and function as they do. Informed by 400 years of evolution, the author theorizes, this innocuous-seeming housing type may well be the antidote to suburban sprawl, urban decay and the catastrophes of global climate change
Charles Duff is a planner, teacher, developer, and historian. In a career spanning 35+ years, he has built or rebuilt more than 300 buildings and led the revival of some of Baltimore’s most successful neighborhoods. Since 1987, he has been President of Jubilee Baltimore, the city’s premier community development nonprofit, and has also served as President of the Baltimore Architecture Foundation. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard University, Charlie also studied at St. Andrews University in Scotland. 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, and has also translated into English two French works on Greek tragedy.
Published by The Bluecoat Press, The North Atlantic Cities is available for purchase via www.northatlanticcities.com and a number of bookstores.