Sublime

rather a little cold than comfortable.

The smart city threatens to be a place where self-driving cars have the run of downtowns and force out pedestrians, where civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, where police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and where governments and companies surveil public space to control behavior.

Stewart Brand, the author of a recent book on preservation called How Buildings Learn, tells of asking one architect what he learned from revisiting his buildings. “Oh, you never go back,” the architect said, surprised at the question. “It’s too discouraging.” For many contemporary architects, time is the enemy of their art.

Decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice, reads the inscription on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren. If you would see his monument, look around. By 1939, the same advice could have been given to a New Yorker asking to see the monuments of Robert Moses. They were everywhere in the great city.

Central Park, most famous and beautiful of the city’s open spaces, “the most noble, the most praiseworthy, the most philanthropic of all our public works,” according to an 1876 New York Herald editorial, had been the creation of Calvert Vaux and the genius of urban landscape, Frederick Law Olmsted, who, in 1857—with Olmsted still an unknown young p

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending,” Lincoln told the Illinois Republicans in 1858, “we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”38 That required a compass, but Douglas’s aligned itself only with his own maneuvering.39 Too often looking back to cover his tracks, he fell too frequently into the thickets, sw

given by Aldo Leopold in his essay, “The Land Ethic”