On Balance

'The least appreciated but most vital of our senses, balance is fundamental to our experience of buildings and cities. Yet neither balance, nor its disorder – vertigo – have received much attention in accounts of modern urban life. On Balance brilliantly unwraps vertigo’s complications, its history, its representation, and its increasing exploitation in the world today. Not since Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny has there been such a thorough and accomplished account of a psycho-physiological sensation and its consequences for our built surroundings.’ – Adrian Forty, Professor Emeritus of Architectural History, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL ‘Sublime and fear are two motifs that encapsulate our enduring fascination with vertigo. Through a brilliant selection of images, the book produces a unique tour de force on the vertical imagination and its architectural spaces: a suspenseful journey which takes us from Hitchcock to contemporary skyscrapers.’ – Maristella Casciato, Senior Curator, Head Architectural Collections, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles ‘It is the complex and relational qualities of vertigo which are detailed so thoroughly in On Balance as it addresses both the architectural forms which prompt vertiginous experiences, and the social, political and poetic implications of giddiness, lightness, and the denial of gravity. {...} Throughout this insightful book Deriu charts how thinking through vertigo has provided writers and artists with a way to challenge foundational assumptions, in a literal and metaphorical unsettling of the ground beneath us.’ – Amy Butt, Planning Perspectives