city
I wish Manhattan condo towers could be required to have street frontage consisting of capsule micro-shops. The affordable retail slots would guarantee the rich folks upstairs interesting things to buy, interesting services, interesting food and drink, and constant market-driven turnover of same, while keeping the streetscape vital and allowing the city to do so many of the things cities do best.
“Cities in Fact and Fiction: An Interview with William Gibson,” by Aaron Shattuck and Gary Stix, Scientific American, August 26, 2011.
Older and less planned quarters of cities and towns are profoundly woodlike, and especially in this matter of the mode of their passage through us, the way they unreel, disorientate, open, close, surprise, please. The stupidest mistake of all the many stupid mistakes of twentieth-century architecture has been to forget this ancient model in the more grandiose town-planning. Geometric, linear cities make geometric, linear people; wood cities make human beings.
The Tree (New York: Ecco, 1983), 61.
I couldn’t be happier than I am in this apartment, with the sounds from Sixth Avenue constantly surprising me, never once repeating themselves.
“Searching for Silence,” by Alex Ross, The New Yorker, October 4, 2010, 52–61.