To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:
1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two...
2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.
3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.
4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...
Tag: planning city 151 urbanism
Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.
Oswald SpenglerTag: city town agrarian countryside the-decline-of-the-west world-city
Ant swarming City
City full of dreams
Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve
that great condenser of moral chaos, The City.
Robert HughesFrom the top of the bus she could see the vast bowl of London spreading out to the horizon: splendid shops with mannequins in the window, interesting people and already a much bigger world.
Julia GregsonTag: beauty people sun alone london river city bus east-of-the-sun julia-gregson
One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.
Julia GregsonTag: beauty people sun alone london river city east-of-the-sun julia-gregson
On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.
Albert CamusThis metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.
Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.
Slowly the truth is loading
I'm weighted down with love
Snow lying deep and even
Strung out and dreaming of
Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
We're threading hope like fire
Down through the desperate blood
Down through the trailing wire
Into the leafless wood
Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
This disappearing world
I'll be sticking right there with it
I'll be by your side
Sailing like a silver bullet
Hit 'em 'tween the eyes
Through the smoke and rising water
Cross the great divide
Baby till it all feels right
Night falling on the city
Sparkling red and gold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world"~David Gray
Tag: love beauty night pretty city david-gray
We leave to monsieur Le Corbusier his style that suits factories as well as it does hospitals. And the prisons of the future: is he not already building churches? I do not know what this individual -- ugly of countenance and hideous in his conceptions of the world -- is repressing to make him want thus to crush humanity under ignoble heaps of reinforced concrete, a noble material that ought to permit an aerial articulation of space superior to Flamboyant Gothic. His power of cretinization is vast. A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide. With him moreover any remaining job will fade. And love -- passion -- liberty.
Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)
Tag: architecture city 35 situations corbusier
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