I’ve been thinking and working on this original idea lately and will use a series of slides to illustrate the points:
What do you think?
I’ve been thinking and working on this original idea lately and will use a series of slides to illustrate the points:
What do you think?
I am fortunate to have a relationship with my urban design hero, Leon Krier. In 2003, while working for the County of San Diego’s General Plan 2020 update, I was denied a vacation request to work on a charrette in Chico, California led by Leon Krier. So, I quit my job, drove to Chico, and sat right across the ’table from the Leon (and my eventual life partner, Geoff Dyer) for a week and walked away from the experience a more inspired and humbled designer.
Over the years, we met at New Urbanism Congresses, and he visited San Diego a couple of times. We drove in a convertible across the desert, gave a riveting lecture to a packed house in Balboa Park’s Museum of Photographic Art theater. And, I’ve watched him formulated the ‘Tuning of Architectural Settlements,’ (Chico), the ‘San Diego Quartet’ (American Four Corners), and the Coronado Gates (different column heights would appear to ‘turn’ as you drive across the curved Coronado Bridge and land in its ceremonial entrance). Fortunate.
During this Covid-19 spring 2020 shut down, a young University of Texas student, Adam Bell, and I sat down with Leon and recorded a series of conversations on a wide variety of topics while he was stranded in his new urban district in Cayala, Guatemala. So, these are the #CayalaConversations, that we’ll continue until Spain reopens and he can go home… Watch them here:
With more to follow…
In the middle of reading Dan Solomon’s new book, Love versus Hope, and think he’s beautifully addressing the issues of how to build a more socially inclusive city.
He posits that cities based on Love are a ‘continuous city’ that is manifested in terms of timeless traditions as well as buildings conjoined to form streets/squares. This traditional city has a far better track record at building cities than those based on Hope, which he calls the ‘ruptured city’ that is designed for revolution derived from naive modernist optimism that has destroyed urbanism/cities to implement their hopeful vision of the future that is greener, safer, accessible, whatever.
That said, the ‘walled city’ is a continuous city in an exaggerated/extreme form that moves away from being socially inclusive and just and towards being based on fear to some extent. This leads to a vision of Yoda whispering about how fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.