“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.”
William Gibson
more infosource: “Cities in Fact and Fiction: An Interview with William Gibson,” by Aaron Shattuck and Gary Stix, Scientific American, August 26, 2011.
category: architecture, city, New York City, retail, urban landscape
medium: Interview
“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.”
John Fowles
more infosource: The Tree (New York: Ecco, 1983), 61.
category: architecture, city, geometry, human being, mistake, nature, tree, wood
medium:
via: Kevin Lippert“Cities have lived lives, too, and when you walk them, you begin to see exactly who they have become.”
Richard Goodman
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