Zitat des Tages von Leon Krier:
Horizontal and vertical sprawl... are the dinosaurs of an ending fossil-fuel age of synthetic culture.
As is the case with all good things in life - love, good manners, language, cooking - personal creativity is required only rarely.
The problem was Le Corbusier was a genius and an enormous artist, but he tried to resolve problems to which there is no solution. So the idea to demolish the centre of Paris in order to adapt it to the car - he drew it! - is something not even the most bloody dictators conceived.
Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.
Why should the Eisenhower memorial be over twice the size of WWII Memorial? Why should it be so vast as to comfortably house two Lincoln Memorials, two Washington Monuments, and two Jefferson Memorials - all six at once?
Surprisingly, the Eisenhower Memorial design contains almost none of the known Gehry-box of tricks. His giant etched chain-link curtain, first applied in 1979 to hide an ungracious parking garage at Santa Monica Place, is resurrected for Eisenhower to screen the equally graceless facade of the Department of Education.
You need a prince to make a town in an intellectual sense. Developers want to make money. If they cared about architecture, they'd become architects. I've had so many projects that never came off because they had no sponsor, and not because they were utopian. I just want to build a town that's normal.
Tiredness sets a natural limit to what a human being is prepared to walk daily, and this limit has taught man all through history the size of rural or urban communities.
The more you densify a city, the more congestion will increase, however technology changes... cities so packed that they will no longer function... vertical sprawl.
