Sublime

Among all the various kinds of buildings (old or new) in a city, some kinds are always less efficient than others in adding dwellings to the land. A three-story building will get fewer dwellings onto a given number of square feet of land than a five-story building; a five-story building, fewer than a ten-story building. If you want to go up far

When Robert Moses came to power in New York in 1934, the city’s mass transportation system was probably the best in the world. When he left power in 1968, it was quite possibly the worst.

In Mumford’s great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers.

With an insight still rare among government officials in 1960, the Governor had seen that if congestion was ever to be eased in and around urban areas, the emphasis on building more and more highways must be replaced by a balanced transportation system—in which emphasis must be shifted, gradually but steadily, to mass transportation.

The Generic City,”

William Mulholland (the engineer) was L.A.’s fabled water czar, whose wildly ambitious vision of a 233-mile aqueduct brought water to the desert and allowed the city to grow far beyond its natural capacity to support urban life. David Wark Griffith (the artist) was the seminal film director of the silent era, the man who almost single-handedly

What most of their projects had in common was an alarming obsession with social hygiene. In future, instead of lurking on streets and squares and alleys, the human beetle would be made to live in tower blocks, to commute by monorail or biplane or moving pavement, to scuttle about in allotted green space between the

When we ponder the layout of ancient cities, we must acknowledge that they are the by-product of thousands of years of human tinkering. People came together in villages and tried different living arrangements. What worked, they copied and expanded. What didn’t work, they discarded. That is, if those experiments hadn’t already killed or disbanded