Civic Art: an introduction to urban design

Matthew Christopher Murray's Abandoned America, the premier collection of photography of abandoned sites across america. Abandonedamerica.us: where historic preservation meets art

In American Vitruvius, Hegemann & Peets cite Charles Garnier's furious disavowal of Haussmann's placement of his opera house in the center of an intersection.  A fix is suggested on the right.  - Elihu

"I shall end with a reflection on the question posed by the issues paper: “is being European just one more layer (the external one) added to the onion of our personality, less deeply felt than the core? Or is it more like a garlic structure, each clove individually wrapped up and kept separate but tight together by the European skin?” I think that a continent hosting frog- eaters can take seriously a garlic ideology. I love France, which I consider as my second native country, as happens to many from the Piedmont Region. But when I am in France I feel irritated by many aspects of the French culture and habits. I am well inclined towards Germany, because I married a German woman but also, probably because of this, frequently I cannot stand Germans. And so on with many other European countries. But when I land in America and I find in New York many aspects of the “American way of life”, and when I meet after a lecture with colleagues of different countries, I feel really at home only with Europeans. Only at this point do I discover how European I really am. Only then, only once outside Europe, do I become a European patriot. Brussels should become the city where Europeans learn what it means to be a European citizen." - Umberto Eco, from Brussels, Capital of Europe published by the European Commission in October 2001

Leon Battista Alberti takes the "rhetorical question" to the next level.  - Elihu

--Mike Davis, City of Quartz, 240, on Frank Gehry's Hollywood Library

The Name of the Rose, 1986

Barry Maitland, Shopping Malls: Planning and Design, 1985

Today, Silver Spring is a rapidly redeveloping and vibrant city featuring a mix of public plazas and open space, offices, housing, hotel, retail, entertainment, transit access, and civic uses–all easily accessible on foot thanks to sustained downtown and CBD redevelopment efforts by public and private entities alike.

-Göran Therborn (2002): Monumental Europe: The National Years. On the Iconography of European Capital Cities, Housing, Theory and Society, 19:1, 26-47

Piazza San Marco, built on the political and religious center of the old Venetian Republic. 

Curtain Time at the Lincoln Center (1996) -Guy Wiggins

“Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers… Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.” -Ronald Reagan, June 12, 1987 Reagan’s speech, “Tear Down this Wall”