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28 Apr 08

New Urbanists Point the Way Forward by Catesby Leigh, City Journal 18 April 2008

"The New Urbanism and suburban sprawl have something in common: they’re uncool. New Urbanism is uncool because it is basically traditional; modernism is still the thing in architecture, notes Andrés Duany, the most influential New Urbanist."

For some reason, City Journal is impossible to annotate (neither highlights and consequently "stickies" work), which is too bad. Some good ideas in this article, but I can't mark it up.

www.city-journal.org/...bc0418cl.html - Preview

urbanism new_urbanism suburbia sprawl smartgrowth density modernism architecture style city_journal

A gifted crew of architects and planners, they have changed the conversation about urban planning in the United States. They reject conventional postwar developers’ essentially quantitative, two-dimensional, single-use-oriented blueprints for residential subdivisions and office parks in favor of a qualitative, three-dimensional, mixed-use approach to designing neighborhoods and towns that generally involves reliance on traditional architectural styles.
Perhaps the New Urbanists should cherish their outsider status. A gifted crew of architects and planners, they have changed the conversation about urban planning in the United States. They reject conventional postwar developers’ essentially quantitative, two-dimensional, single-use-oriented blueprints for residential subdivisions and office parks in favor of a qualitative, three-dimensional, mixed-use approach to designing neighborhoods and towns that generally involves reliance on traditional architectural styles.
1 more annotations...
- To make the most of these changing public preferences, the New Urbanists need to focus on a vision that supports the resurgence of an architectural culture—which is precisely what we haven’t got now.

22 Dec 07

Britain's Lost Cities by Gavin Stamp - Times Online

- review of Gavin Stamp's "Britain's Lost Cities, an engrossing, no-punches-pulled denunciation of the wilful destruction of our urban landscape since the 1930s..."

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/...article3050987.ece - Preview

architecture britain cities modernism redevelopment style urban_renewal

What the Luftwaffe began, arrogant, philistine town planners finished off. Now a new study names the guilty men, Stephen McClarence says
5 more annotations...
- Stamp describes today's Bradford, one of the 19
  cities whose fate he chronicles, as a pale shadow of “the dense, complex and
  lively pre-war city recorded in old photographs”. Seething with elegant
  outrage, he hits out at planners who have vandalised so much of its almost
  exclusively Victorian fabric.
  
  They sent in the bulldozers and wrecking balls, replacing arcades, markets and
  warehouses with buildings that were either dreary or dreadful and which
  systematically squandered the city's dignity. “As in other cities,” he
  writes, “the inadequate and unnecessary postwar rebuilding of Bradford now
  seems a criminal waste of money, energy and materials.”
  - - I guess now we can fathom the *real* secret affinity between Victoria, BC and the UK, because similar trends were inflicted on the former, too... - on 2007-12-22
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- Until the 20th century, he points out, change in cities “tended to be
  piecemeal, occasional and organic”, even though Victorian railway companies
  ruthlessly slashed their lines through anything in their path.
  
  The religion of the motor car changed all that. Councils dismembered their
  cities to build ring roads, flyovers and car parks. They used any excuse for
  demolition — that old buildings had a limited life; that Victorian
  architecture was at best unfashionable, at worst sinfully ugly; that the
  mess left by Luftwaffe raids needed tidying up.
  
  The Nazis became convenient scapegoats for plans already under way. Coventry's
  medieval Butcher Row was razed in 1936, four years before the first bombers
  flew in. It had become, the Lord Mayor sniffed, “a blot on the city”.
  Planners in Canterbury welcomed the wartime destruction and set about their
  own.
  - - the rule of the automobile -- also sometimes characterized as the city's "suburbanization" -- certainly contributed to the vandalism of finely stitched urban fabric here, too. - on 2007-12-22
  Add Sticky Note
- Naming names, Stamp tells a tale of neglect, incompetence, philistinism and
  sheer bloody-minded malice, encapsulated in a comment by Herbert Manzoni,
  the City Engineer and Surveyor of Birmingham from 1935 to 1963: “I have
  never been very certain as to the value of tangible links with the past,” he
  said in 1957. “As to Birmingham's buildings, there is little of real worth
  in our architecture. Its replacement should be an improvement, provided we
  keep a few monuments as museum pieces to past ages.”
  
  City after city was blighted with modernist buildings that, in an almost
  totalitarian way, were obsessed with function and efficiency and often
  looked like multistorey car parks, even when they weren't.
- Keith Waterhouse summed things up in
  1975 in two sentences that will resonate with anyone who has ever sat
  narcoleptically through a local council meeting: “I would put most of the
  blame on the councillors who invite and encourage the laying-waste of their
  own townships. The trouble is that many of them are not very bright.”
  - - ha!, how true... - on 2007-12-22
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- Their legacy is the desperate sense of loss engendered by Stamp's book, with
  its 200 stylishly presented archive photographs. I lost count of the number
  of pictures of smart, historic, charming streets captioned: “Every building
  in this photograph has since disappeared.”