Veritas et Venustas

Glenn Beck: He's A Communist and That's Okay

LOTS OF NEW URBANISTS, including yours truly, have been running into Agenda 21 Tea Partiers who say New Urbanism is a Commie Socialist Plot, part of the New World Order the UN is imposing on us. So how do they explain the two new towns discussed by Jon Stewart?

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V&V: I'm a Communist and that's okay

V&V: The Revolutionary Communist Party Likes New Urbanism (sort of)

Quote of the Day - In which it is revealed that faces and posture can reveal much

I was reminded that Mr. Foster is also responsible for the canopied enclosure of the inner court at the British Museum, a pompous waste of public space that inserts a shopping gallery into the heart of a sublime cultural institution.

- Michael Kimmelman, In Renderings for a Library Landmark, Stacks of Questions, Still

That's a good sign. Most critics reflexively rave about the British museum, because it was designed by Sir Norman Foster.* It reminded me of something I wrote after a trip to England:

Watch the faces of people walking around Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and you'll see happiness and contentment. Watch the faces of people walking around Renzo Piano's Morgan Library addition (or Sir Norman Foster's British Museum courtyard), and you'll see people who look bored, at best, or who have the pained expression of someone who's just been forced to swallow something that's supposed to be good for them, like Castor Oil.

* a nice guy, by the way

Quote of the Day - Daniel Libeskind Tells the Future

It sometimes feels as if cities like Paris and Venice have been coated with formaldehyde and turned into museums. The old formulas of ‘respecting context’ won’t work. We must create a new context and puncture past beauty with raw, powerful contemporary architecture—buildings that shock and amaze and bring out the ­romance of relics of Victorian and ancient times. It was once true that the palace, Palladian villas, and churches were architectural, while the other structures in a city were just buildings. But I think the art of architecture is ready to come out in every single structure we erect. -

- Daniel Libeskind

He does have a way with words. If only he would quit his day job and become a writer.

More from V&V:

The Modernist Disease: Cogito Ego Sum

Cogito Ego Sum II

Egotecture

Egonomics

Egonomics 2.o

Egological

Egolution

This your museum on drugs & These are your museums on drugs

Quote of the Day

"Until [the 20th] century, the public and the profession [of architecture] shared a known vocabulary; the divide between them was simply a matter of the degree to which traditional forms were mutually understood. Like so much else in the arts, architecture has taken new forms and developed a new and often arcane vocabulary. The alienation that started with the distrust and dislike of the unfamiliar in modern architecture has been exacerbated by the increasingly abstract and esoteric nature of current philosophy and practice."

- Ada Louise Huxtable, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (1997)

Hope Springs Eternal

Yorkville Promenade

IN our upcoming street design book, we've catalogued a variety of street types that will be useful for repairing the damage the Functional Classification system has done to our towns and cities. One of these is the Promenade type; so we've renamed our Yorkville Rambla the Yorkville Promendade. Here's a downloadable PDF of the competition entry from 2011:  Download Yorkville Promenade

Plus, two similar schemes by Massengale & Co LLC, Dover, Kohl & Partners and H. Zeke Mermell: Winslow Homer Walk and Jane Jacobs Square.