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Title: Dispersed City of the Plains by Harris Stone, Joan Stone, J. William Carswell, Jone Stone, William Carswell ISBN: 0-85345-993-2 Publisher: Monthly Review Press Pub. Date: December, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: The thoughts of one of the wisest Critics
Comment: I was a student of Harris Stone's for several classes during my career at KU's School of Architecture and Urban Design in the 1980's. The book "Dispersed City of the Plains" is just so very typical of Harris. Harris was one of the best Critics (that's the code word for Architecture Teacher, Professor, etc.) that I ever had. He was truely wise. Stone had a way of looking beyond what was fashionable to print in the Professional Journals to see the truth in the Architecture. Harris always taught us, as students in Kansas, to be proud of our herritage. He had the ability to see the art in what others disregarded as mundane and below their recognition. Harris was a proponent for the masses, the end users of Architecture. It didn't matter to him how great a building was proclaimed if it didn't serve it's purpose for it's users. Stone's books always remind us to design for the people, and the environment, not the Journals.

Rating: 5
Summary: Poignant, provocative thoughts on the Great Plains
Comment: This is a challenging, original analysis of the meaning of the built environment of the Great Plains. The author begins much the way that Walter Prescott Webb did in his pioneering work on the same subject, by analyzing the building blocks that organize space and the economy of the region, in this instance grain elevators, barbed wire, and windmills. He then moves through types of housing, and communities from hamlet to major city.

Harris Stone's basic thesis is threefold: 1. The Great Plains experienced a fundamentally different pattern of settlement than the Eastern U.S., because the land was subdivided before settlers arrived; 2. European models of city form are not valid for analyzing the built environment of the Plains; 3. Instead, the settlement pattern of the Plains is a work in progress that anticipates the impact of today's information-age economy, and it should be evaluated accordingly.

The author's text is handwritten, with his own drawings illustrating his points. His ideas are spare and challenge the reader to participate and "fill in the blanks." His style is somewhat akin to the way Jane Jacobs analyzes city life, while his conclusions contrast dramatically with hers.

There is also a poignance that permeates the book, because Harris Stone was dying of cancer as he wrote it. Too weak to finish preparation of the text for publishing, his wife and colleagues at the University of Kansas School of Architecture completed the final few pages, in a different style of handwriting and illustration. One mourns the loss of so original a thinker, as one is simultaneously stimulated by his text.