Aleksey P

CIAM proponents claimed everything that came before as useless. To them, the world was a tabula rasa, and they worked vigorously to eradicate anything traditional from the toolkit of architects. While elitist and authoritarian if not fascist in their pronouncements, they undertook Le Corbusier’s hypocritically self-aggrandizing style war.

Modernist

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Cities are amalgams of buildings and people. They are inhabited settings from which daily rituals — the mundane and the extraordinary, the random and the staged — derive their validity. In the urban artifact and its mutations are condensed continuities of time and place. The city is the ultimate memorial of our struggles and glories: it is where th

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The tendency all too often is to see urban form as a finite thing, a closed thing, a complicated object. I want to stress what we know instead to be the case — that a city, however perfect its initial shape, is never complete, never at rest. Thousands of witting and unwitting acts every day alter its lines in ways that are perceptible only over a c

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