We Live In An Almost

Japan Lives With Drastic Segregation Between The Sublime, The Ugly, And The Utterly Without Qualities. Dominance Of The Last 2 Categories Makes Mere Presence Of The First Stunning: When Beauty 'happens', It Is Absolutely Surprising.

There's Something Really Interesting About Current Urbanism: The Only Model Is The Universal Model, And There Is Increasingly Incapacity To Consider The Virtues And The Qualities That Are There, And Then To Build On Them. The Only Thing Is Complete Transformation.

The Grid Makes The History Of Architecture And All Previous Lessons Of Urbanism Irrelevant. It Forces Manhattan's Builders To Develop A New System Of Formal Values, To Invent Strategies For The Distinction Of One Block From Another. The Grid's Two-dimensional Discipline Also Creates Undreamt-of Freedom For Three-dimensional Anarchy. The Grid Defines A New Balance Between Control And De-control In Which The City Can Be At The Same Time Ordered And Fluid, A Metropolis Of Rigid Chaos.

We Know That Las Vegas Is Junk, But At The Same Time I Think That Exactly The Same Process And Ultimately Also, Perhaps The Same Logic, Attaches Itself To Or Underlies Our Masterpieces. We Live In An Amazing Era When In Spite Of An Absence Of Masters There Is An Explosion Of Masterpieces.

Asia Is Still Dominated By Skyscrapers. I Hope That, In European Cities, It Will Become A Declining Trend. They Were Almost Never Necessary.