Conversations About Where We Live
This is the first of six posts that will comprise Six Memos for the Next Architecture. The six memos are titled Restraint, Simplicity, Solidity, Circumstance, Fluency, and Durability. "Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize … Continue reading Six Essays. #1: Restraint
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 … Continue reading Artes Perditae
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, … Continue reading Future Perfect. Simple.
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 … Continue reading Word on the Street
Why did we decide to sacrifice our cities for the sake of cars?
These last twelve months, as all the world has struggled with the pandemic, more people everywhere are – at last – starting to realize that our health, our environment, our climate, and our lives in cities are all in need of reevaluating, rethinking, and transformation. And it’s an urgent matter of time. Time is emerging … Continue reading City Punches Time Clock
"Maybe the future is bad. But there's a future beyond that, right?" Yuno Gasa. First there is the city that we have constructed. Next is the city of the present, a quiet city, a city of stillness, anxiety and waiting. As we are confining ourselves indoors, we ask ourselves about life in our present cities. … Continue reading The Quiet City, The Future City
Recently I discovered the existence of a new kind of streetcar - the Autonomous Rail Rapid Transit tram, which has been dubbed ART. The system was developed in China and is trackless - it operates on existing streets (!!). The system has a cost of about one tenth (!!!) of railbound streetcars and it can … Continue reading Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch
First, a Prologue. We here at A Town Square are in a CDC quarantine: we had spent time in the wonderful cities of Madrid and Valencia, left at the last possible moment as the Spanish nation locked itself down, and arrived in the US to be told that we would be spending a couple of … Continue reading Our Grid of Streets, Blocks, and Buildings, And at Last, No Cars….
As I have endlessly noted here, our city of Rochester adopted the scorched earth policy for automobility at an early moment: streetcars removed in 1941, subway demolished in 1956, expressways as our emerald necklace in the 1950s, a mid-century Inner Loop that strangled our central city, demolition of everything possible downtown in favor of parking, … Continue reading Rearranging the Grid
A Town Square 