Not Many Architects Have The Luxury To

Most Old Cities Are Now Sclerotic Machines That Dispense Known Qualities In Ever-greater Quantities, Instead Of Laboratories Of The Uncertain. Only The Skyscraper Offers Business The Wide-open Spaces Of A Man-made Wild West, A Frontier In The Sky.

Manhattan Has Generated A Shameless Architecture That Has Been Loved In Direct Proportion To Its Defiant Lack Of Self-hatred, Has Been Respected Exactly To The Degree That It Went Too Far.

When Air Conditioning, Escalators, And Advertising Appeared, Shopping Expanded Its Scale, But Also Limited Its Spontaneity. And It Became Much More Predictable, Almost Scientific. What Had Once Been The Most Surprising Became The Most Manipulated.

Not Many Architects Have The Luxury To Reject Significant Things.

Evil Can Also Be Beautiful. The Coliseum In Rome, For Example, A Wonderful Structure With An Awful Past. Just Think About The Bloody Gladiator Fights There.