On the Roman street Where We Live: Pompey’s Theater

Pompey's Theater, 55 BCE Pompey's Theater was built nearly 2,100 years ago, and was the first masonry theater in Rome. When it was completed, it could seat about 20,000 (!) by various estimates, and it covered a almost all of our neighborhood. Our apartment was on stage left, very near to the stage's apron and …

Home from Rome: Surely surviving Modernity

"Modernism is clearly expressed by…. the segregation of activities and peoples, the specialization and isolation of professions and the systems they create, the (rapid) centralization of ever larger (capitalist) institutions (and developments), and the monopoly of certain technologies, most notably the car."   Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis. Campo de' Fiori We have just …

Inside, Outside, Rooms, Memory.

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.” Zadie Smith Two memories emerged with startling clarity recently. Prompted by a television program, and for reasons which I do not understand, I was at once transported to Louis Kahn's Unitarian Church (1962), where an orchestra was performing on the screen and, …

Artes Perditae

Artes Perditae is Latin for lost arts. And now it is time for us to find, recall or unearth as many lost arts as we can. We are going to need them. Why? Because as Paul Gilding tells us in his book "The Great Disruption": "We've been borrowing from the future, and the debt has …

Future Perfect. Simple.

I will be brief. For once. Last Month here I described various more or less (mostly less) attractive visions for a livable, durable and workable city of the future. Most of what I could find as I searched for places that looked like somewhere some of us might enjoy, might call lovely, might call home, …

Future Past, Future Perfect

In an attempt - perhaps futile - to find enthusiasm and hope for what lies ahead for us Earthlings, I have been re-examining all kinds of depictions of the 'Ideal City of the Future.' Images of dystopia hugely outnumber anything even moderately resembling a happier urban model for better days. This is a sad but …

Word on the Street

Recently we got to talking about street scenes common when we were kids, and friend and neighbor Roger Brown told me about trucks like this: In my neighborhood just north of Chicago we never had a grocery truck, though I am sure it would have done well. Or would do well - more about that …

A Time in the South: Charleston and Williamsburg

We have recently returned from a time in Charleston, SC and Williamsburg, VA. I wanted to offer a few thoughts about our travels and a few reactions to what we observed. I will begin in Charleston. Encountering any urban region in our time nearly always involves cars. This seems obvious: I note this as an …

Tempus Fugit

At the end of February I wrote that we should live in city neighborhoods where we could walk to everything important in our lives in just a few minutes. I noted that this new and very old way of thinking about city living, most recently articulated by Prof. Carlos Moreno, who teaches at the Sorbonne …

Next Thursday

"The Next Thursday, just after dawn, seeing a Packard parked sideways at the far edge of our oldest mall's huge lot, Sheriff Wilks found Bobby Grafton in the backseat, dead. My grandfather was wearing - my parents explained later by phone - his best gray suit, one they'd forced him into for Ruth's funeral. He'd …