Lectures

New York City is mnemonic for my identity and wordily life. The very mention or sight of the city triggers, sights, sounds, and feelings. The answer that I sought as a child was answered when I researched housing for a book I wrote about Leipzig. As I researched Leipzig many of the observations and hardships I suffered on Simpson Street became clear. The tenement prototype was actually developed in England, France and Germany and later exported to the USA. The “hof” was it s prototype name in Leipzig, Berlin, Dresden. Its application to the USA had some very serious and significant differences. The ones in Europe were through units from the street front to the rear Hof. The Hof, backyard was and is today common and accessible to all and is not used as a though way for out spiders. It is private and well guarded by residents who use and view it. The buildings were doomed to become slums when they were made subject to both rent control and absentee owners. These owners finally traded the buildings beyond their value and over their potential return so that eventually the tax burden well out paced the income, revenue and ultimately the sales price. I know this because Jose Fernandez shared these facts with me about building s they owned.

Indeed my visits to so many cities have indeed answered the curiosity of little Barie. My design studies and works have added to this knowledge and together helped me to understand how the grid and its utilities were laid and then building formed to house “the people” in a country/urban setting. That is to day; to have all the amenities of the country while living in the city. Wow, was that a failure! The “big apple”; “the city that never sleeps”; “while you sleep, we bake” (Wonder Bread), etc. were all the native lingo for our precious city. The last random plan of New York can been seen in 1782 and then the beginnings of grid in 1803 till the most rigid and prolific permeating grid of the whole Island of Manhattan in 1807 called the “commissioner’s map". Each borough has got a different character, linguistic dialect, history, and features.

For example, Manhattan is known for its skyscrapers, financial district and China town. It is also the place that the world thinks of when they say New York City. I was born, attended Pratt, visited my relatives, dated, and lived in Brooklyn. I spent my childhood, playing, studying and working in the Bronx. I visited, danced, dated, worked, lived, and founded Earth day and LME in Manhattan. I dated, visited, chauffeured, and hung drapes in every borough. Places such as Staten Island, Throgs Neck, City Island, Coney Island, Brighten, Greenwich Village, China town, Little Italy, Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, East side, West side, Bowery, Park Ave., Central Park, etc. were parts of The City belonging to the city and not just borough. The boroughs were each famous for something: and interior decoration was no exception: Bronx or Brooklyn Baroque aptly described the kitsch, synthetic copies of classic that permeated taste and symbolized the norm inside decoration standard. Bronx and Brooklyn could not be outdone by Long Island Kitsch.

Then there is Westchester County including New Rochelle, Bronxville, Yonkers, Harrison, and White Plains. There is Long Island including the Hamptons, Fire Island, the beaches (Jones, Long, Rockaway, and Montague Point; not to mention the various counties of Nassau and Suffolk in which I dated, hung drapes, swam, was hospitalized after an automobile accident, visited and even danced. The way in which all these places are well connected is symbolized by my voice being heard on Long Island years after recorded and broadcasted daily from Hartford, Connecticut. (“Lend an ear. LAE; 93.7 on your FM dial”) Aside, from short visits out of the city to Ohio, Miami, 72 European cities, Caribbean and studies in Connecticut at Yale it wasn’t until 1973 when I was 36 that we finally left New York and really began living in the rest of the country and the world. Even the 18 plus months we lived in Puerto Rico, we would often return to New York to shop and visit friends, family and cultural facilities.

Manhattan consists of squares of land raised up to the scrape the sky forming mass and volumes. What we see in skyline is like a mountain range or forrest. The masses limit and bound avenues and boulevards as great canyons and wadi. When we enter within these masses we only see parts, platforms of one raised level until we look out to see the canyons from yet another perspective. It forms the context of life and authenticates the scale of our being. We men have created these masses and dwell amongst them as giants. We relate to them as our creatures of which we are masters and creators. These giant creations are the strength of our combined corporate ability of which we are a part. NYC, the icon of which I am its' child.

I can even say that visits we made to Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Germany were merely extensions of our life in New York. The idea of ever leaving “The City” never occurred to us. Width and breadth of each neighborhood is one of the great mysteries: to extend beyond each neighborhood and borough boundary. Where are the borders; each had its own and it never was the same for any two people and sets of experience. These borders were defined by experiences and memories of those experiences, streets, landmarks, friends, characters, and personas of persons a, places and businesses and buildings. I was a boy from the South Bronx even at Christopher Columbus, Pratt and Yale: I was always the “real native street boy” whose background and breeding were incompatible. I came from the New York South Bronx streets and tenements. For one year I attended Christopher Columbus High School while living on Simpson Street.

In like manner we were outsiders in Saudi Arabia when we choosed to live outside of camp to earn the extra “hardship allowance" and not pay the very high rent fee for the inside camp accommodations we were outsider dealing with ARAMCO: we never resided on an ARAMCO compound but visited daily for work, shopping, recreation and some schooling and social events. I worked in Dhahran and every day would drive to the same make shift parking lot and enter the compound through back doors and holes in gates. After a while hundreds of faces became familiar and we’d nod and greet each other. It was so reminiscent of a European city’s urban center or American small town. Where people living from many remote places would meet in this one place. Aside from my work place I regularly had to get my mail, bank, eat in the cafeteria, shop at the commissary, and attend to identification, immigration and tr4avel issues. In the very early days these things were housed in low one story barrack type building. Keep in mind the heat, the blowing sand and the glaring sun. The distances one had to walk were vast. This same outsider separation occurred even when we returned in 1991 to the Eastern province, the ARAMCOns regarded us as more than outsiders, but rather second class citizens along with the TCN’s that lived and worked outside of Dhahran.

I was a native New Yorker dealing with mid westerners at ARAMCO, Del Tura, employees and constituents in Lee County. I am alive and enlivened when I am in a city. I am bored and unanimated when in suburbs or rural area. I conclude that I am there fore other-directed by external stimuli. The city stimulates. It provides options giving me choices. I could never imagine in the suburbs or country. I can imagine in the city. The city is man-made and synthetic. What you see is commerce, selling and marketing made manifest. Consumption and satiating is institutionalized in this massive metaphorical manifestation.

New York’s Boroughs

Each borough had different character, linguistic dialect, history, and features. For example, Manhattan is known for its skyscrapers, financial district and China town. It is also the place that the world thinks of when they say New York City. I was born, attended Pratt, visited my relatives, dated, and lived in Brooklyn. I spent my childhood, playing, studying and working in the Bronx. I visited, danced, dated, worked, lived, and founded Earth Day and LME in Manhattan. I dated, visited, chauffeured, and hung drapes in every borough. Places such as Staten Island, Throgs Neck, City Island, Coney Island, Brighten, Greenwich Village, China town, Little Italy, Harlem, Hells Kitchen, East side, West side, Bowery, Park Ave., Central Park, etc. were parts of The City belonging to the city and not just boroughs.

The boroughs were each famous for something: and interior decoration was no exception: Bronx or Brooklyn Baroque aptly described the kitsch, synthetic copies of classic that permeated taste and symbolized the norm inside decoration standard. Bronx and Brooklyn could not be outdone by Long Island Kitsch. Famous people who have lived in the Bronx: performers June Allyson, Red Buttons, Anne Bancroft, Tony Curtis, Robert Klein, Hal Linden, Penny and Gary Marshall, Rita Moreno, Chaz Palminteri, Roberta Peters, Regis Philbin, Carl Reiner; athletes Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jake La Motta; authors E.L. Doctorow, Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Herman Wouk; statesmen John Adams, John F. Kennedy, Colin Powell; designers Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren; and the conductor Arturo Toscanini. By the way, Break Dancing and Salsa music was born here.

Aside, from short visits out of the city to Ohio, Miami, 72 European cities, Caribbean and studies in Connecticut at Yale, it wasn’t until 1973 when I was 36 that we finally left New York and really began living in the rest of the country and the world. Even the 18 plus months we lived in Puerto Rico, we would often return to New York to shop and visit friends, family and cultural facilities. I can even say that visits we made to Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Germany were merely extensions of our life in New York. The idea of ever living anywhere else other than in “the City” never occurred to us.

I can even say that the visits we made to Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Germany were merely extensions of our life in New York. The idea of ever leaving “the City” never occurred to us. Width and breadth of each neighborhood is one of the great mysteries: to extend beyond each neighborhood and borough boundary. Where are the borders; each had its own and it never was the same for any two people and sets of experience. These borders were defined by experiences and memories of those experiences, streets, landmarks, friends, characters, and personas of persons a, places and businesses and buildings.

Rural folkways and mores are worshiped by urbanites as an act of rebellion and compassion. Sports occur in rural and urban contexts.Religion occurs in both and shared by both.The city was my context and shaped my identity up to 1973 The key places I remember are Hunts Point and the South Bronx.

I relate to the sidewalks, streets, tenements, tall building, subways, and traffic. It is the “life” in and amongst the infrastructure that has determined my references and recollection of contexts. I am the boy of the streets and not aloof from the streets. I was never a bum, gangster, hoodlum or troublemaker. I was an adventurous “Tom Sawyer” in my own man made Mississippi. There are others who have fond memories of the neighborhoods in which I lived. About our neighborhood in the South Bronx/Hunts Point.

Alan H. Newman writes that “My family and I lived in an apartment on Coster Street. We were only a half block from the corner where PS-48 is (not exactly a commute!). Coster Street between Lafayette Ave. and Spofford Ave. was primarily apartment buildings on one side, and more private homes on the other, with a lovely church near the corner with Spofford Ave. There was a Grocery Store (Berenson's) and a candy story at the corner. I lived on Faile on the same block as PS 48.

Even though so many people lived on Coster Street, parking was never a serious problem, at first. There were few cars...how many of us really needed cars back then, during the 50's? I lived there during the forties. My father always had a car because he enjoyed driving, and he was a driver by trade...a truck driver for dairy companies (first Gold Medal Dairies, then Dellwood Dairies). He even took me out one morning to go with him to deliver milk and other dairy products to little stores and restaurants in another area of the Bronx.

I had relatives who lived in Brooklyn, and I remember traveling with my brother and my mother. We used to go by bus to the Simpson Street elevated train station...and took this seemingly endless escalator ride to the heavens, where the train platform was. Then we just rode, rode, rode for hours...through Manhattan, into Brooklyn..., and arrived at our destination, in another world.

Living at Hunts Point then seems like a social cocoon, in retrospect. It was cozy, wholesome, and happy, relaxed and cleans...at least for a child. Children were loved, cherished, and cared about. Some things that are wrong today were okay then. Lives were full. We had everything we needed. The memory is truly indelible. The city was my context and shaped my identity up to 1973. There was a magical park-like development on the river, which my father took me to visit. The couple was so kind to me and their daughter who was older than I was and blind. Loved my visits. She taught me to tie my shoelaces and played her records for me to hear. Win wan waddle ho, pretty boy over the plow; and winkin blinkin and nod. There were others. She took me for adventurous walks on the shores. She showed me the village fire station, boats, trees, and the many lovely houses with the flowers. It was paradise. I can never find it on a map and when I visited Arles in France I thought of this place. Whenever I hear of architects talking of human scale I think of this place. Del Tura tries to be like this place but is too sophisticated. Each house was different and one story on the front but had stairs leading down the back to the sound. It is one of the mythical places in my urban vocabulary. About this neighborhood, John McNamara: History in Asphalt: The Origin of Bronx Street and Place Names (New York: Bronx County Historical Society, 1984)

Gary Hermalyn and Robert Kornfeld: Landmarks of the Bronx (New York: Bronx County Historical Society, 1990) says that Silver Beach is a neighborhood in the eastern Bronx, lying on a bluff near the tip of Throgs Neck overlooking the East River. The land was used as a lockout during the American Revolution. A farm in the area owned by the Stephenson family .was sold in 1795 to Abijah Hammond, who built a mansion (later the offices of the Silver Beach Garden Corporation). In the 1920s the Peters and Sorgenfrel families formed Silver Beach Garden (named for the color of the beach at low tide), a summer colony of bungalows that were later adapted for year-round use; most of the streets were named for flowers and trees found on the Hammond estate. Residents owned their houses but rented the land until 1972, when they joined together to buy it. In the mid 1990s there were 350 small houses lying along narrow lanes. The neighborhood is not easily accessible.

When you get off the El at the Gates Avenue station and Broadway, you have only to walk up the street about a block or so to be transported back to a time when showbiz was really showbiz...when a night out meant putting on a shirt and tie or a dress...a time when entertainment meant more than just a movie and an overpriced candy bar. That's because the proud old RKO Bush wick Theater is still standing at the corner of Broadway and Howard. I passed this daily to commute to our apartment on Franklin and Flat bush and to visit Roseanne. To get to this intersection I would take the Washington Ave. bus to its last stop and walk one block. In the snow or rain it was very cold so I stood in the lobby of the theater waiting for my next bus or just walking to Rosanne's Bushwick Ave townhouse.

Hunts Point in the Bronx

Though most commonly identified as a center for food distribution and commercial activity, Hunts Point is also an area with a rich cultural and architectural history. Often overlooked by residents, employees and visitors, Hunts Point's landmarks provide valuable clues to the community's diverse historical background. Standing tall at the intersection of Lafayette Avenue and Tiffany Street, the Bronx Apparel Center serves as a monument to New York's industrial past. Built in 1911, this mammoth brick structure once housed the American Bank Note Company. Serving as a mint for such countries as Mexico and Haiti, the Bank Note Company not only issued currency, but also printed travelers' checks and lottery tickets. Today the building is home to the Bronx Apparel Center. With nearly 148,000 square feet of commercial space, the Apparel Center is host to a number of corporations, specializing in a diverse array of products and services from apparel and food to construction and security services.

Drake Park

In the midst of the concrete, steel and brick that dominate Hunts Point sits a patch of parkland that contrasts the area's industrial flavor. Drake Park, located between Hunts Point and Oak Point Avenues, is another reminder of the community's history. Within the Park is a small graveyard. Aged stone monuments mark the resting-place of some of Hunts Point's earliest settlers. Among those buried there are Poet Joseph Rodman Drake and members of the Hunt family, who once framed the peninsula.

I spent several years of my childhood in Drakes Park, which we called the cemetery. It was our lovely place to go. When I dream about my lovely childhood I see the park and its environs in an idealized town of small red brick houses and peaceful streets. I later saw real small towns in Holland and on the Mississippi looking like my dream of an extrapolation of Drake Park.

Drake Park is laid out through the former estates of Barretto, Spofford, Dickey, Faile, and Hoe, which were subdivisions of the earlier Leggett and Hunt lands of Revolutionary times. The street is named for the poet Joseph Rodman Drake, and this led to the naming of adjoining avenues for Halleck, Longfellow and Whittier.

Drake Park opened in 1910 to encompass an ancient burial ground that belonged to the Hunt family. Joseph Rodman Drake was a physician and poet who spent his happy youth on Hunt's Point and wrote odes in its praise. He died in 1820, age 25, mourned by all, and is buried in the cemetery. His friend Fitz-Greene Halleck wrote his epitaph. Joseph Rodman Drake was born in New York City, August 17, 1795; died there September 21, 1820.

The short life of Joseph Rodman Drake has a romantic interest, not only for the charm of his personality and his association with Fitz-Greene Halleck who enshrined his memory in an imperishable lyric, but because of the valor with which he met the doom that overtook him. Dying at twenty-five, after four years' struggle with tuberculosis, Drake's bright spirit asserted itself to the last and the series of witty poems which appeared in the "Evening Post" under the title of "The Croakers," pleasantly satirizing local celebrities and events, were written when his illness was already far advanced. Part of these was in collaboration with Halleck. Drake's long poem, "The Culprit Fay”, with its charming fancy, was written as a refutation of the charge that American rivers have no romantic associations. Drake's early boyhood was a struggle with poverty, but he managed to secure an education and fitted himself to be a physician. In the outward aspects of his life the analogy with Keats is striking. His daughter under the title of “The Culprit Fay, and Other Poems” published Drake’s poems, containing his patriotic classic, “The American Flag”, in 1836.

There were houses built in this style on my block as well and my father’s cousin lived on the street where many of these houses were. I once meet my future cousin Dorothy walking on this street.

Spofford Ave hill where I raced my red wagon downs and stopped it with my feet. I don’t remember breaking any bones but I did learn about the importance of planning ahead, such as having good brakes. Later, when I learned to ski, this lesson was very understandable. East river/long island sound where we picnicked and swam. Hunt cemetery and Drake park at Oak point Ave. Hunts point Blvd., Drake Park south and Longfellow Ave The Drake Street area is laid out through the former estates of Barretto, Spofford, Dickey, Faile, and Hoe, which were subdivisions of the earlier Leggett and Hunt lands of Revolutionary times. The street is named for the poet Joseph Rodman Drake, and this led to the naming of adjoining avenues for Halleck, Longfellow and Whittier. Drake Park opened in 1910 to encompass an ancient burial ground that belonged to the Hunt family. Joseph Rodman Drake was a physician and poet who spent his happy youth on Hunt's Point and wrote odes in its praise. He died in 1820, age 25, mourned by all, and is buried in the cemetery. His friend Fitz-Greene Halleck wrote his epitaph.

Longwood Historic District

Today these row houses serve as homes to many of Hunts Point's employees. Adjacent to the Hunts Point Peninsula, the Longwood Historic District is another area of historical interest in the South Bronx. Situated on the opposite side of the Bruckner Expressway in the Longwood section of the Bronx, the Historic District is a community of elaborately embellished turn-of-the-century row houses. Built by architect Warren C. Dickerson between 1897 and 1901, these colorful two and three story houses have been designated landmarks by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

American Banknote building

Standing tall at the intersection of Lafayette Avenue and Tiffany Street, the Bronx Apparel Center serves as a monument to New York's industrial past. Built in 1911, this mammoth brick structure once housed the American Bank Note Company. Serving as a mint for such countries as Mexico and Haiti, the Bank Note Company not only issued currency, but also printed travelers' checks and lottery tickets. Today the building is home to the Bronx Apparel Center. With nearly 148,000 square feet of commercial space, the Apparel Center is host to a number of corporations, specializing in a diverse array of products and services from apparel and food to construction and security services. When shopping to buy a Lexus in 2003, the salesman eventually told us that he owned the building as well as a building in Soho. He lives in a house in Bonita Springs with a boat and lots of land.

Southern Boulevard

About Southern Boulevard in History in Asphalt, published by Bronx County Historical Society, 1991, John McNamara writes:

“Like the Grand Concourse, this wide and important boulevard did not evolve from an Indian trail, but was a drawing board creation envisioned by the Engineering Department of the Annexed District in the 1870s to be a grandiose thoroughfare sweeping up from E. 133rd Street and Third Avenue, cutting through the wide estates of the eastern Bronx, bypassing Crotona Park and Bronx Park and terminating at the Botanical Garden. It was laid out across the original Jonas Bronck farmlands which became the holdings of the Morris family, on through the lands of the Leggett homesteaders, the "Longwood Park" estate of S.B. White and the Fox, Simpson and Tiffany properties. It was the boundary line of the Minford, Woodruff and Lydig estates, and cut off part of the academy grounds of St. John's University (now Fordham University)”. Fort Apache called Morrisania area included Simpson, Fox, Intervale, Simpson Hunts Point Library. I attended PS 20 at 1086 Simpson Street in The neighborhood officially called Morrisania. Hunts Point Palace: 953 Southern Boulevard (@ cor. E.163 St): I saw black singing groups performing here.

Buster Brown Shoe Store had an x-ray machine showing your feet. Buster brown was the sponsor of one of our favorite Saturday morning Radio shows. The commercial was” That’s my dog tag, he lives in a shoe; I’m buster brown, I live in there too”. It was also the show which taught me my favorite birthday song sung to the tune of the love song in Franz Lehar’s Merry widow:” Happy birthday, Happy birthday, just for you; Happy birthday and may all your dreams come true. As you blow out the candles one light stays aglow; it’s the light that lights your life where ere you go. (He’s the light that lights your life where ere you go; I changed it to sing to Christians on there birthdays).

B&G Music Shop: Located in the center of Southern Boulevard with a speaker on the outside and where I heard such songs as Nat King Cole’s: ”Nature Boy”; ”Maharajah of Magadore”, etc. I spent my fortune here. The owners were so kind to educate me, listen to my wishes, and get me special music, which I never heard before. “I want music without voices, beautiful, with strings and harmony” so they got me classics and so I built my classical music collection. Later, they ordered Electronic Music for me.

Chinese Restaurant: Here is where my mother took my brother and I every weekend (usually Saturday) after some Joan Crawford movie. My Mom would tell me I don’t understand the movie because I was too young, that someday when I grow up I will. I would ask her to explain it tome. It was so funny. It was the same story all the time. Then I’d explain it to her. Of course, I would wonder why she is crying; she was a great sport about all of this!

The waiter of the Chinese restaurant knew my order by heart. He would see us and out would come one serving after another of the same thing every Sunday, for years. Water, egg drop soup, Chicken Chow Mein, and chocolate ice cream. The cost for the meal was about forty-five cents. Yum, Yum! At that time I did not use chopsticks. I learned that from my friend Gene who would take Christina and I to Manhattan’s China Town to one place called ”Wo-Ping” in particular. Our favorite dish three was a wedding dish called in Mandarin:” raw fish and chicken with coconut sheds”

Loft Candies: Strategically located on the corner of Southern Blvd and Westchester Ave with a triangular island in the middle of the sidewalk with beautifully decorated boxes of chocolates. My favorite was caramel crunch. On valentines and other holidays I’d but my mother a beautiful box of chocolates. She was very happy about this. She would give me a big hug and kiss. She was my Valentine!

Snowflake Bakery: The store in front with ovens and bakers in the rear. A window with attractive cakes and inside and white tile floor and gigantic glass counter with five wonderful ladies who after six years of my Friday evening and Sunday morning visits knew me my order and whims. On Sunday morning I’d get the bakers dozen (13 rolls for the price of twelve) My order was always; 3 bagels, 3 bialys, 3 rolls and 3 onion rolls and one free braided egg roll. My mother gave me the option of buying some sweet I liked; I often choose chocolate éclair, which had vanilla cream inside and covered in chocolate topping. I visited this wonderful Shoppe from 1946 to 1952. Snowflake is my standard for all other bakeries in the world. However, I do love German bakeries.

Pelham Parkway: At the end of the parkway there is the park and in the park there are stables where you can rent a horse and go horseback riding. My brother and I did this.

Parkchester: Built in the Bronx off Tremont Ave, in 1938 by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and where Natalie Finkelstein and Larry Schneider lived. It preceded Styvestant town in Manhattan. It had beautiful open parks and amenities and had a long waiting list. Costs were very reasonable. It also had its own big shops and shopping center. You can not tell one building from another. This project was to be my prototype for anonymity in design when visiting LeHarve, and Khobar, Riyadh and Dammam towers

Prospect Ave was a wide and very peaceful street. Originally part of Woodstock Village called Eastern Ave of East Morrisania it was a very swanky neighborhood with several theatres including Rex and the Prospect theater @161 street which was a playhouse and now the Olympic theater concert Hall and where I saw the black and white first series of “Superman” with George Reeves the father of Steve Reeves. Originally Prospect Ave. had an esplanade and was designed, as a “double carriage way” like King Abdul Aziz Blvd. In Al-Khobar Saudi Arabia. It was where Weiss Formal and Bridal Gown shop was located and where Berland has his laundry and did his pressing.

Italian store: restaurant and ice cream across for cemetery with grounds for goats and an abandoned hut. The old lady and her husband who owned the place knew me. I could sense their loneliness for their homeland and they could sense my affection for their dialect, dress and food smells. They encouraged me to play with their goats, which prepared me well for my encounter with goats on the little bridges in Amsterdam twenty years later. As the neighbors on my street, she wore black dresses and stockings. Later when I visited Italy the only time I saw such dresses was in the southern provinces of Positano, Pompeii, etc.

Billboards: Elsie the Borden Cow and the Borden Milk Plant at the 138 St bridge. It is in this area that Classic Interiors had its factory and my Aunt Rose built her factory to make lamps and lamp shades. There is now a street named after her in that neighborhood.

Manhattan

Germantown: From Simpson Street, My mother took my brother and I by train to visit Mr. and Mrs. Bloom’s son who was an army Captain living on East 96 street Next door to a great Deli which sold “Specials” (Knockwursts) He and his wife were so hospitable and my Mom enjoyed there company. We would take home a supply of this wurst after every visit. The Bloom’s had a younger son:”Boomy” and we’d visit them at their hardware store further south on Southern Boulevard.

Broadway and 96th Street

North of Columbus Circle, Broadway has a center mall, known by some as Needle Park. Scattered along its length are various former public restrooms, including this one, now labeled "The Broadway Mall Community Center”. The IRT rumbles underground.

Famous restaurants included Rumplemyers where you get great hot chocolate and a view of central Park and central Park south’s fashionable pedestrian traffic. Also, one can be seen and see others in attendance; much like the coffee shops of Europe.

Seagram’s: Phillip Johnson designed this building and who occupied one of it s floors. It had La Fonda Del sol on the ground floor and when it opened Alex Illich took me there for a great lunch. It had beautiful Mexican theme designs. I photographed the building for my Photography class, especially the outdoor plaza and fountain that at the time was new thing for the city. I’d go there on dates with Barbara and our Irish friend from Kahn and Jacobs.

I joined the Yale Club of New York City in the 1969 and frequently used the swimming pool, sauna and steam room on Saturdays before going to a movie and returning home to Christina. I was a member of the board and got to know Gil Colgate. When we were in Saudi Gil helped us get a room to stay in the building and we enjoyed the dinning room and it s facilities. While living in NYC I invited the son of Marshall Mc Luen to lunch and on Christina’s birthday we reserved a private dinning room where Alex Goldfine, Anne of LME and New Rochelle and a few others celebrated a sumptuous and nicely served meal. Later when visiting from Saudi we invited Gil and Gregory Kipnis to dinner on the roof top grille for diner. It was grand.

The can honors the winner of "Miss Rheingold 1957". "Miss Rheingold" beer cans are extremely rare and worth hundreds of dollars each.

Miss Subways' prize? A silver charm bracelet. In 1976, the combination of feminism and graffiti chased Miss Subways away forever.
Not a few Miss Subways favored Maidenform, not that you could tell from the posters. Somewhere along the way, Maiden Form became one word.

Colin Powell was the the son of Jamaican-born Luther and Maud Powell, Colin Powell was born in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx on April 5, 1937. He attended public high school and then earned a bachelor's degree in geology from the City College of New York, where he participated in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. He lived just two blocks from me in the “Banana Kelly” neighborhood (for the long curve of Kelly
street) He was born in the same year as me in 1937 onApril 5 and unlike me did attend Morris High school.

Gaelic Park, a green spot located in the northeast Bronx, is mystery to those who are not part of the Irish Community. It’s a fixture, though to those who hail from the land of Joyce and know the Bronx as Ireland’s 33rd county.

The park is located just west of Broadway, on the north side of 240th street, near Manhattan College. It is an important gathering place for Irish and Irish-Americans alike. It gives them a place to meet and socialize, as well as to keep in touch with what is going on at home in Ireland.

The park includes a playing field and dance hall. In addition to the hurling matches held there, a number of sporting events take place at Gaelic Park. There are also concerts and dances that feature Irish music both old and new. The park also holds benefits to efforts to further peace in Ireland, and fundraisers for people here in the states that are in need of help with medical expenses due to an accident or devastating illness.

The park was purchased in 1926 by The Gaelic Athletic Association of Greater New York, (GAA for short,) and established in 1928. It has been given a few different names over time including Innisfail Park, but since the 1950’s it has gone by its current moniker, Gaelic Park, a reflection of the park’s decidedly Irish flavor.

In Ireland, The GAA was started to promote the game of hurling and Irish football there, just as Gaelic Park in the United States was started to help the two rough and tumble sports on these shores. Hurling and Irish football have always held an important place in the social life of the Irish community, as has been noted by visitors to Ireland throughout the past century.

Nearby Kingsbridge, to the east of Riverdale, originally was a predominantly working class Irish Catholic population. The Irish began to settle the Bronx in large numbers in the early 20th century. For several generations many of them worked as servants maintaining the estates of the Anglo-Protestants, and in the police and fire departments, much as they did in other northeastern cities. By the 1950's, as the Irish population became upwardly mobile, they began to move out of the area. Today Kingsbridge has a gritty run-down appearance to it, but the neighborhood is still very lively and is mostly Hispanic. There is still a substantial Irish population in Riverdale and Kingsbridge, and many of today's Irish are recent immigrants from the Emerald Isle. Almost all of the many bars along Broadway are Irish bars, as one can see from the names and green colored shamrocks on them, and this is the most visible sign of the strong Irish presence that remains in the area. On Saturday afternoon in nearby Van Cortlandt Park, a passerby can see Irish sports teams competing against each other playing curling, rugby, and Gaelic football.

It was often from the Gaelic Park neighborhood that I’d collect hundreds over several years to drive them for a beach holiday to the Jersey shore. The towns they most frequented were Ocean grove, Spring Lake, Asbury, and Deal. They loved me! I drove well, sand Irish songs to them and loved to tell them stories about elves, gremlins, Brigadoon, etc. I visited Gaelic Park in search of lovely Irish girls. They were my favorite, especially the candidates for Miss (Subway) Rheingold. There were always posters in the subways. I also loved to visit the Irish bars in Manhattan with the smell of boiled eggs, corn beef and cabbage.

Kensico in Westchester County, New York. It was flooded due to the construction of the Kensico Dam. The Kensico Dam was built to be part of the system of reservoirs that were constructed to provide New York City with water.

I can only imagine that my school had taken me here. As soon as I could drive it became my out of town destination of choice. I took every girlfriend, fiancée and wife to this place. It was spectacular and a place, which was near by so far from every thing, we lived with. Coming out of the tenements to this place was like interplanetary travel. It was reminiscent of the final scene of Dr. Zhivago.

Valhalla is an unincorporated hamlet which had a total population of 5,379.As the population of New York City grew in the 19th century, the need for water was becoming greaterWhat was needed was a reservoir that would contain waters from the various reservoirs and act as a holding tank that could easily provide needed water to nearby New York City.In preparation for this huge enterprise, individual lots of land were condemned and families had to move to such surrounding towns as Valhalla, Armonk and White Plains. Workers had to be brought to the area of the new dam and housing and other facilities had to be built for them. The actual construction of the dam began in 1913, and was concluded in 1917, three years ahead of schedule.

To conclude I would like to encourage you to visit cities, enjoy the one your in and know the similarities and differences between one and another city. I hope you will appreciate cities and enjoy them for there own special and peculiar characteristics. Enjoy the big city for its complexities, vulgarities and immense opportunities. Get lost, reinvent yourself and become something you imagined you could be. A big city can be very uncomfortable, inconveniencies but it is usually on the cutting edge of new beginnings.

Your old friends will call you crass and unconventional but once you grasp the fragrance and tempo of the big city, it will never leave you. You will be willing to sacrifice many of life’s pleasures for the stress, tempo, and sharpness that allow predators and creators to be all they are. You will discover that no one man nor collection of men can create a big city but only a will on the part of a collective, complex, diverse and adversarial separate teams. It is not the city planners dream come true but the diverse and contradictory reality of God’s creation.

new york city,
identity,Leipzig,tenement,England,hof,big apple,island of Manhattan,the city that never sleeps,Bronx,Hunts Point,Drake Park,Longfellow,Colin Powel,,Blog Flux Local - Florida,

Urbaism: Urban Life: Urban New York: Lecture 8

2008-05-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

Urban Life:
Urban New York
By Barie Fez-Barringten
www.bariefez-barringten.com

Just a street away was the office of the Pratt family which I visited to see Richardson Pratt and the New York Stock Exchange where I’d visit with Frank Palamara, then the President of the New York stock exchange. As a child of 10 I learned to travel to Manhattan using public transportation and kept traveling ever since. I had already learned to use the trolley, which we called “the street car” when I was five from Faille Street to Grandmas house and the “Y”. My first interborough goal was Manhattan to either Times Square or the Museums on Fifth Ave. I started this long distance travel from our apartment on Simpson Street. But, keep in mind the starting point of my journeys to Manhattan were from the station, which was at the end of my block. I did not even have to cross the street. And, I was an expert at crossing streets, well practiced since I was four on Faille Street.

To get to Rockefeller Center I had only to walk up the street, up the stairs of the IRT and onto the platform.
When the Lexington Ave. Local came, I would enter the car and go to 180th Street and transfer to the express. I’d take the express to 149th and Grand Concourse and enter a huge elevator to the IND level and to through tunnels to the IND train which would take me directly to Rockefeller Center. I’d exit and wind my way through tunnels which went up and down till I got to the network of three levels of shops, exhibits and convenience stores and the elevator lobbies of the RCA towers. I’d enter the elevator I needed and I’d be on the floor of the radio broadcasting studio I was visiting that day. I often went with my friends, Milton, Benny and Gerry and my brother Saul. Some times my mother would take us. Rockefeller Center sat on eleven acres of land which had been a derelict's respite but had now been transformed into a palatial paradise, a paradigm of communications and the world’s center. John D. Rockefeller had years before cleared the area and built this vision of NBC broadcasting, Theater, Ice skating and related facilitates. It was a landmark and would stand with the other World class Landmarks. IT started the year of Christina’s birth in 1927 and completed in 1930 it seemed to me it was part of eternity. I could go from Simpson Street where I listened on the radio to all my favorite programs to the source at Rockefeller Center’s Radio City. I could see my entire favorite broadcasts in progress and be part of the audience. I could see the sound effects man, orchestras, and casts. I knew where each studio was and what it looked like. The creator of this center was one of sever commercial royals whose names are synonymous with the great Assyrian and Babylonians rulers who create the models for all cities and urban centers. John D. Rockefeller Jr., Astor, Mellon, Vanderbilt, etc. these were the wealthiest families in the world and they lived in my city. Wow!

The Depression came before building could start on the RCA building and surrounds, however, and the plans for the new Opera House faded away. JDR Jr., committed to a long lease of the Columbia property, decided to create an international business and entertainment center. Later his family was to continue their vision at the World Trade Center. I believe the September 11 attack was directed at the ideas and heart of this family and their vision.

When Christina entered the landscape contest for the WTC site I prophesied the design and profession of the winning solution would be based on Rockefeller Center and be very simple imprint measured to the WTC site. It was the winning solution by an Israeli landscape architect working nearby for the City of New York. Which I also predicted it would have to be someone with continuous access and intimate familiarity with the details of the site. A simple solution which would not be controversial; and, inexpensive and easy to build. And a solution which would be politically easy to navigate the controversies to ensue. I also believed that the landscaping design, materials, steps, and feeling of Rockefeller Center was the prototype for any such future parks and memorials in New York City. That the Rockefellers had got it right the first time! This was based on my cosmopolitan aesthetic.

All my years of training my ability to see and understand and experience as an urban designer has gifted me with judgment and wisdom in urban planning and design.

Visiting this center was like coming to heaven, being greeted and cared for at every turn by ushers, matrons, messengers, and stewards. They all wore uniforms, helped and guided so that your movements and awareness of the amenities was easy and effortless. They tell you the schedule and upcoming events of the day. They would help you get to the nest event quickly.
Striking Art Deco office-building complex consisting of 19 buildings and scores of upscale shops and restaurants connected by three layers of underground corridors. There is a 400 by 400-foot forth-lower level for trucks and deliveries.

Rockefeller Center, and the sophisticated circulation systems and public amenities in what was the first large-scale business complex in the United States. An innovative urban development at the time it was built, Rockefeller Center was a model for future projects in the decades following its construction. A mixed-use complex containing 13 buildings for commercial, retail and entertainment uses, the various structures were surrounded by open plazas and gardens embellished with public works of art. Built between 1932 and 1940, the original buildings had a similar architectural vocabulary that featured Grey Indiana limestone, simple geometric forms, and bold facades with little decoration except for vertical lines used to emphasize the height of the buildings. The central focus of the project is the former RCA building, a tower rising 70 stories above the Channel Gardens, which serve as a monumental passage to the building from Fifth Avenue. Even today, the complex is still considered one of the best examples of urban architecture in the world built in the 20th century. In the 1960s, the Center was extended west across Sixth Avenue. The more recent additions to Rockefeller Center are somewhat bland, tall buildings set in open plazas that are characteristic of late modern architecture. A walk through midtown follows.

Christina got to know David Rockefeller in connection with dinners given at the International House on whom he was a founding board member and she a resident artist. He invited her to prepare a design for his Chase Manhattan Plaza in Lower Manhattan, which finally did not succeed because of staff’s concern with sea breeze erosion to the Plexiglas.

When she lived at the International House, Christina was introduced to David Rockefeller who invited her to propose a sculpture for his new Chase Bank in lower Manhattan . It may be said that John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s life was directed toward the ideal chiseled in stone over International House in New York: "That Brotherhood May Prevail."

I got to know Nelson Rockefeller supporting him in his campaign for both Governor and then President. I met him several times at the Waldorf Astoria. When I was a child I recall the announcement that they were tearing down the sixth ave elevated structure. The Avenue of the Americas bears no resemblance to the neighborhood cleared to make way of the center.

Vincent Scully once described an illustrated section and plan of the original project which reached north to 59 street and south to 34 street in at least 8 layers of rail, auto and truck roads, parking and dock facilities. Hotels office towers and other building linked to these levels and the terminal was the pedestrian link. You could drive; park, or use trains and railroads all linking to the levels of elevators. The huge project was drawn and planed with many of the wealthiest investing. Finally, the project suffered economic woes and no longer was feasible. Bit by bits parcels of land were sold off in an effort to rescue the balance and eventually the track and train system remained. Some links to building and tunnels were formed and closed but still do exist. Although I searched, I could not find any of the original plans on the World Wide Web. .

The Algonquin Hotel
There isn't a place in New York more important to Dorothy Parker's enduring legacy as big as the Algonquin Hotel (59 West 44th Street). Any Parker enthusiast worth his weight in books will know that The Gonk is where the Round Table met from 1919-1929. They were the most celebrated literary group gathering in American letters, ever. But there was a past to my city filled with political, social and economic strife.
"America was born in the streets", it was not in the squalid, savage turf struggles of the Five Points, but in the streets of Boston and Lexington in 1776 - where the people traduced here as having no identity or qualities outside their xenophobia, fought for the liberties that all modern Americans take for granted.

The Tammany Society was a patriotic organization that championed democratic government and opposed aristocracy. Formed circa 1786, the Tammany Society had branches across the United States, but the most powerful office was located in New York. The organization was named for a Delaware Indian chief, Tamanend. The Tammany Society tended to support the Democratic-Republican Party and the Democratic Party.
Books written about this tumultuous and harsh history include Herbert Asbury’s depictions of 19-century gangsters in the five points of New York City; and, Charles Dickens descriptions written in 1842. It was during the ninetieth century that the urban wars and strifes were fought to produce the tough building codes, political parties, religious separations, city infrastructure and amenities we now see in the twenty first century.
The New York I knew as incandescent lights until the sixties was seductively lit a child.

Telephone Party Lines: Party lines are telephone lines shared by more than one household’ subscriber'), would lift the receiver, a light near the plug would light, and the operator would switch into the circuit to ask "number please?". Depending upon the answer, the operator might plug the plug into a local jack and start the ringing cycle, or plug into a hand-off circuit to start what might be a long distance call handled by subsequent operators in another bank of boards or in another building miles away. Party lines were the exception before World War II, not the rule. In cities and country, most people shared a line with two to ten to twenty people. You could talk only five minutes or so before someone else wanted to make a call. And anyone on the party line could pick up their receiver and listen in to your conversation.
Eavesdropping was as easy as picking up the phone; when, instead of urging us to "reach out and touch someone," the telephone company warned not to talk too long; when you counted long and short rings to know a call was for you.
I believe is was by attrition that our party line became a private line because 90% of what phone companies call multiparty lines are really telephonic ghost towns. They're old party lines that over the years have lost all but one party -- a single household still billed at a party-line rate for what amounts to a private line, and thus might pay a dollar or two less a month. it's hard to imagine six homes on one line. But 70 years ago, most people had party lines. In the Bell System, 36% of residential customers were on two-party lines, and 27% were on four-party lines. Bell chief engineer Joseph Davis said in 1899. "It therefore requires that enough subscribers be placed on a line to make them dissatisfied and desirous of a better service." According to historians the 1959 movie Pillow Talk, in which Doris Day silently and indignantly listened in as Rock Hudson wooed other women, was set in New York City. They say that was a fantasy; by 1930, neither New York City nor Washington, D.C., had a single party line. That is incorrect because DAyton 9-3129 (DA9-3129= 329-8129) was a party line) which we got while living on Faille Street. It was then converted to single line by attrition. Back then," she adds, "the telephone was such a wonderful new thing that people didn't mind sharing a line."

However, the bane of the party line was what some called "rubbering" -- eavesdropping. In the days before radio and television, your neighbor's conversation might be your entertainment.
Party lines carried with them certain social niceties as well as arguments. You didn't talk too long, a point driven home by phone company literature on telephone etiquette. "You'd say, 'We've been on long enough, someone else might be needing' the line,' "Even after the conversion some would say that "I still get that feeling, too, if I've been talking for a while." I learned to listen for the click of the other party or the operator getting on the line and eavesdropping which I still listen for today.
Though the lines lacked privacy, they helped build a sense of community. If several calls in succession to the same number sparked worries that something was wrong, others would pick up and listen in to find out whether there was anything they could do to help.

Sixth Ave Elevated

What an evocative scene John Sloan painted in 1928 of Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street in 1928! Women in short skirts and cloche hats are rushing off to a party; the Sixth Avenue El rumbles overhead, and a trolley rumbles underneath it. Within 10 years or so, most of the scene as painted would be swept away. The El would be razed in 1939, and all the storefronts on the right side would also be condemned as Sixth Avenue was widened. Yet, the buildings on the left are still there, most notably St. Joseph's Church at the extreme left, and the tall tower of the Jefferson Market Courthouse. And, bishop crook lampposts have also made a Sixth Avenue comeback.

December 20, 1938, when Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, who had actively supported the campaign, donned goggles and with acetylene torch personally attacked a steel El girder on Sixth Avenue at 53rd Street. Beyond the new vistas and opportunities for redevelopment created by the destruction of the unsightly structures, the banishment of overhead trains from the avenue also led to the completion of the IND Sixth Avenue subway line, making the El immediately obsolete.
The End of an Epoch commemorates the dismantling of the El tracks on Sixth Avenue, ushering out an era in the city's public transportation and unleashing conflicting emotions among the system's riders. Whereas many had cheered the announced demolition, camera-toting New Yorkers thronged Sixth Avenue's El during its final days of operation to preserve memories of its unrivaled views of the city (and outlooks into private apartments adjacent to its tracks). Other sentimentalists took souvenirs, pillaging fixtures along with their bolts.2

The Sixth Avenue Elevated Railway was constructed in 1878 and cast a shadow over the park until it was closed in 1938. In November 1934, Architecture magazine noted that Bryant Park had “become one of the most disreputable parks in the city.” During the construction of the subway that replaced the El, the park was used for storage of construction equipment and otherwise filled with debris.

For much of its history, it's been an avenue without a number, ever since it was proclaimed the Avenue of the Americas in 1945. New Yorkers have always referred to it as Sixth, however, and in the 1980s the Department of Transportation finally gave in and installed new "6 AVE" green-and-whites along its entire length.
Sixth got no respect above Central Park, either...it was renamed Lenox Avenue in 1887 for James Lenox, whose collection formed the original New York Public Library; exactly one hundred years later, it was subtitled Malcolm X Boulevard for the slain civil rights leader.

Metaphors on the screen:
But there were other idols for rural and suburban contexts.
People and movies such as represented the rural city contexts:

Marjorie Main
Fans today may remember Tomlinson most for her breezy portrayal in nine movies from 1949 to 1957 of raspy-voiced Ma Kettle, with her tumbledown hairdo, flock of children, and indolent husband. But Marjorie Main (Tomlinson's stage name) had a life before the Ma and Pa Kettle films. From her early twenties she had a career in Repertory Theater, stock companies, vaudeville, and on Broadway, where she played everything from bit parts to leading lady. Appearing in her first movie in 1931, she went on to star in eighty-five films. Along with supporting roles, she shared top billing with Wallace Berry as a comedy team and with Percy Kilbride in the Ma and Pa Kettle series.

Noah Berry; Andy Griffith, John Wayne; etc.

There were many and the movies were about life in rural America or settling America called Westerns.

Cowboy and Indian films and the Lone Ranger. All of these extolled the virtues and values of rural and rustic life.

Suburban Metaphors include movies such as Payton Place and the many TV sitcoms such As the “Brady Bunch”, etc.Science Fiction All Science fiction films suspend contemporary social and political context showing people living with the techniques and products of science. The best of them encounter such issues in terms of the future and the techniques showing utopian and often ideal way issues would be resolved in another time, context and system.

I was thrilled and excited by the fantasy and speculation of the possibilities and potential of escape, power and creativity of my fellow man. With the authors, actors and audience I hoped and yearned for more and better of any thing. With story and context, I saw the technology of today being projected into new contexts. I saw the creativity of my fellow species inverting and creating new technologies to deliver me from the doom and gloom of the earth. I looked for the inkling and thread of possibility and chance I might have to excel and exceed beyond the earth’s gravity, circumstance and reality.

"Shape of Things to Come"

H.G. Wells wrote The Shape of Things to Come towards the end of a long writing career, which began with ‘scientific romances' such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. He was most prolific as a realist novelist, and in this respect, he was slightly out of place in the modernist scene of the 1920’s and 1930’s. The Shape of Things to Come marks something of a return to the scientific romance, but it is very different in form to those earlier works. There is virtually no characterization or plot. The text is based on the notes of an invented character, Dr. Philip Raven, who dies in 1930 leaving Wells with his notebooks. Raven is supposed to have seen the future in his dreams over a number of years, and compiled a ‘history of the future’ based on these. The whole text is an historical analysis of the present (1920’s – 1930’s) and the major phases of world history from then to New Year’s Day, 2106.

In this extraordinary sweeping vision, Wells ‘foresees’ the outbreak of a devastating Second World War in 1940, which lasts until 1950. War ceases, not in a new peace, but with civilization in ruins. Communist uprisings are foreseen, but they do not lead to a new world order. Half the population of the world is taken by the ‘Wandering Sickness’. In the 1950’s and 60’s social dislocation and political disintegration are followed by the collapse of the Christian Church, and power is in the hands of roaming warlords. Cities decay, New York is abandoned in 1958 and London consumed by fire and flood in 1970.

About two thirds of Wells’ text is a detailed account of a projection forward of the early decades of the twentieth century into the middle of that century. It makes considerable reference to recent history and accurately predicts the pressure points and conflicts, which are to emerge in the near future. The playing out of these conflicts, however, is not at all accurate, and the book is as much a thesis on the course Wells would have liked history to take, than any attempt at pure prediction. It is in this sense more of a warning than a prophecy, and more of a romance than a history.

After the destruction of society and its institutions, Wells sets about imagining a new world order. This might be Wells blueprint for the future, although it is a flawed Utopia.
Wells sees no future for either Capitalism or Marxism in their early 20th century manifestations.
The major problem facing the industrial world in the 20th century, he (accurately) predicts will be how to resolve the question of the workforce in capitalist society.
What is to stop them taking hold of the factories and what will become of society if the workers wrest power from the technocrats and capitalists?
Wells is pessimistic about Marxism because he does not believe workers can govern himself, herself, or direct production as in The Time Machine, the brutalized, ignorant and cannibalistic Morlocks, who live underground are, it would seem, a part representation of militant coal miners in England.
In The Shape of Things to Come Wells foresees three phases in the production of the new Modern State:
1. The Plan of the Modern State is Worked Out (World conferences in the Middle East)
2. Objections are dealt with in the Modern State Militant (Futile insurrections, education and aesthetic objections
3. The World State is in control of life (It all just keeps getting better)

The screenplay of the Shape of Things to Come:
Part one takes place in "Every Town" (London) in 1940. Wells had rightly predicted the horror of air raids on major European cities and the movie makes much of the spectacle of defenseless citizens caught up in the bombing. The war drags on with no conclusion and England reverts to a feudal system of warlords ruling a depleted populace decimated by the Wandering Sickness. The Boss is one such warlord who captures an Airman, John Cabal. But Cabal has support from the ‘Wings over the World’ organization, which turns the airplane from an agent of destruction to a force for reconstruction. Cabal is freed when his fellow Air Police arrives to drop ‘Peace Gas’ bombs over Everytown. In this second bombing action, the Boss is killed, and the road to the new technocratic society is begun from its base in the Middle East (Basra).

Part two the action then shifts then from destruction to the rebuilding of the modern state in a celebration of modern technology. The settings here borrow from influential modernist architects and designers such as Le Corbusier. But unlike Le Corbusier’s projects of connecting towers and communities in the sky, Everytown in 2036 is an underground city. It is utterly cut off from nature, using artificial light and air. Images are projected on TV wall screens and genetic engineering prolongs life.

A conflict now takes place within the Utopian Everytown, as Theotocopoulos stages a rebellion against progress, and against the new space gun as a symbol of that progress. Theotocopoulos is a sculptor, artist and an individualist, and he reacts against the soulless, deterministic and dehumanizing (as he sees it) society of Everytown. His protest does not succeed, however, and the space gun, which is to launch Man’s exploration of space, is fired. Although in the book, there is still a further chapter on the triumph of the Modern State, the movie ends with this futile attempt by an artist to stand in the way of scientific progress.

Things to Come qualifies as the first true masterpiece of science fiction cinema, and those who complain about its awkward pace and distant characters are not understanding Well's message, which is that the lives and actions of individuals are unimportant when compared to the progress and destiny of the entire human race. The climactic speech he wrote for Raymond Massey may run on a bit too long, but it remains a wonderful summation of all the noble impulses that drive, or should drive, science fiction. In a sense it was a socialist view of society where the government is more important than the individual but where individual good is benefited by a wise government. It is emblematic of the many facets of urbanism.
,urban life,
New York City,
Manhattan,Wall Street,Palamara,Rockefeller Center,NBC,Telephone Party Lines,El,Central Park,rural,Lone Ranger,Science Fiction,,Blog Flux Local - Florida

The Ideal City: by Barie Fez-Barringten; Lecture 7

2008-05-31T10:10:00.001-07:00

"The Ideal City"

By Barie Fez-Barringten

www.bariefez-barringten.com

As many things that tweaked my curiosity I eventually discovered that they were merely myths and legends conjured by man.

While I was searching for “the real thing” my parents and the world fed me “bologna”,metaphors, and "blue smoke", it seems it was all about the icons.

Even cities had a myth and ethos about itself such as New Jerusalem and Atlantis.

Atlantis an Urban Icon contrasted to the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21:10-27

If all the places in the bible point to non-cities as being sin less and undefiled it is left to the New Jerusalem to be built by God worthy of our habitation. It is not a place, which we should now emulate but expect and anticipate after the tribulation and millennium is complete. It is the place in which God and his saints will abide. This is in the future and not the present. Until then our place is in but not of the world adapting to what ever man made context God’s will brings us.
However, there is mythical city of our ancient mythical past called "Atlantis" in a discourse between Timaeus and Critias written by Plato.

Far from claiming that Plato’s story was historically true, as other authors generally do, Alan Alford, a writer, argues that the story was ‘true’ in the sense that it was a ‘true myth’ describing the cataclysmic origins of the Universe (this kind of myth was held to be ‘true’ by sages of the ancient world). The reason Atlantis ended up in the deep, he suggests, is because the original Atlantis fell out of the sky. The quest for Atlantis thus becomes a cosmic and spiritual quest – for knowledge of the Mystery of Existence and the meaning of life and death.

The bible is already clear about the Garden of Eden.

Alford’s theory allows Atlantis to be in the Atlantic Ocean – just where Plato says it was. It allows Atlantis to be sunk – just like Plato says it was. And it allows Atlantis to be larger than two continents – just like Plato says it was.

A great deal of effort and mythical history to support and maintain an urban icon and myth of its urban inhabitants and life style. A place where music, culture, arts, literature and philosophy dominate the time and efforts of the society. Unlike the science fiction cities of the future science, electronics and telecommunication and information technology rule and reign.

In thinking about New York and seeing the various buildings I came to realize that its founding fathers simply chose ideas and elements of the world’s great symbols to form my city.

It was myths and their recollections of the myths and actually seeing and reconstructing what they had seen. Most actually immigrated or were the siblings of immigrants and they commemorated the memories of there ancestors in the architecture, forms and shapes of the buildings. Just a study of the rooftops of most of the building will easily recall french mansards, English castles, German Tudor, etc.

It is there fore relevant for us to spend a moment to recall those great accomplishments as they formed the city in which I spent my childhood. These are the answers I sought as a child about why the city is the way it is.

Seven Wonders of the World: Urban Icons

Today, archaeological evidence reveals some of the mysteries that surrounded the history of the Wonders for centuries. For their builders, the Seven Wonders were a celebration of religion, mythology, art, power, and science. For us, they reflect the ability of humans to change the surrounding landscape by building massive yet beautiful structures, one of which stood the test of time to this very day. They epidiomise urbanity and man’s ability to be “godly”. As Babel, urbanity and its icons strive to exemplify man and his strength:

Cities As A Manifestation of Urban Man

Urban man reified into a thing called “City”.

(3,211 words)

Today’s world class cities have populations of more than one million people and are of international influence. For example, the influence of the Mexicans on Houston and California, the influence of the Europeans and Puerto Ricans on New York, and the influence of Canadians on our Northern states. Not only cities, but also multinational global corporations take on cosmopolitan and urban characteristics as a gypsy or Bedouin tribe projecting its presence, power and control. Even, within global city connections between neighborhoods, ghettos and sectors challenges cross culturalization and require cosmopolitan thinking. The thought is to negotiate, navigated and relate to accomplish settlement, necessity is the mother of invention and city folk find the "chutzpah" to enter Harlem, South Bronx, Village, etc. I have always enjoyed the adventure of sojourning to a new New York neighborhood and finding my way. Later I applied the same attitude when visiting a new foreign city.

Castles, palaces and royal fortresses are metaphors of cities. They are abstractions of the cities they depart from and rule. They are inhabited by people who yearn to be in the city and because they are not tend to bring the best of the city to the palace.

And by so doing create the model for the development of the city and state they left and rule. The kings lived and built his army and constituents he ruled the land as a feudal lord. The farmers and army around could live with in the fortress wall or out. Those in were “right”, citizens, and civite. Those out side were not.

Urban’s Latin gives us the best definition of Urbanus belonging to the city or town as refined and polished, Where the French further define. Urbs, urbis, and a city as urbain where “Urbane” belongs to a city or town; as, an urban population.

Which is to say that we can discuss City as the place and Urban as the operations, ideals, goals and conditions of the place.

It means that the urban phenomenon can occur in a city or not. There can be cities, which are urban, and others, which are not. When they are not urban, are they rural or some other thing. There are many cities, which are neither urban nor rural. The can be sub-urban which is to say an off spring of a city where urban inhabitants have fled to form another administrative and municipal entity attached dependent and related to the city come urb they abandoned.
Urban is also relating to or concerned with a city or densely populated area; "urban sociology"; "urban development" and located in or characteristic of a city or city life; "urban property owners"; "urban affairs"; "urban manners" as opposed to rural and country.

Some have said that urban is is inherently co-dependent, socialistic, communistic and liberal by necessity and but not as despotic anarchy. It is as exceptional as Hong Kong is to China.
I believe that cities are a manifestation of urban man and not that urban man is a manifestation of cities. Dr. Richard Ingersoll of Rice University says that a city is a collective artifact, made of many buildings and spaces designed by a variety of architects, builders, craftsmen, and patrons.

In some cases, like Venice or Kathmandu, cities have such a wealth of architectural expression that they strike one as total works of art (that is in fact the exact expression Marcel Duchamp used to describe Manhattan in 1913). The city is thus a collective artifact that is the site of cultural conditions, the setting for almost everything that will be remembered, and in this cities are inseparable from history. This definition by Ingersoll suits my own definition as both the city and its inhabitants are more than a place or a collection of people but a place with structure, logic, science, philosophy and systems; where law and order rule and reign. It is not lawless and open territory but aggregated and coalesced by mandate, codes and ordinances. Likewise people with urban ideas, thoughts, culture, arts, sciences, and philosophies can inhabit it. Both are subjects of the mind and orders beyond mere physics and military establishment. It isn’t, as some would contend merely a roman grid and imposed structure nor an implantation of a culture. Cities and there urban inhabitants are metaphoric and cerebral requiring life and support.

Ingersoll adds that Sigmund Freud in Civilization and its Discontents conjectured that the city of Rome might make a good analogue for the human mind, because like the mind it possesses the constant reference in simultaneity to different times and different realities. The city for Freud was like a theater of memory in which the palimsest-like architecture of Rome, with layer upon layer of history peeking through, was a way of visualizing the simultaneity of knowledge stuck in the memory. And all cities have this tendency to become a palimsest, even the most seemingly orderly and sterile new town. The flux of human existence and its political and technological impact on space occurs with such uncontrollable multiplicity, that a city is never coherent, it is never complete, its order is never respected, but instead it is constantly besieged by a set of simultaneous and contradictory transformations.

So, what is a City?

We can define the word "city", without making reference to any particular city. The first suggestion is that it was a large concentration of people--a social entity. To this we might agree that it is also a physical entity as a collection of buildings, mostly dwellings. Then we might consider the city in terms of what it is not: it is not the country but separated from it usually by a defensive wall, and the people are not country people as they have diverse activities that corresponds to a division of labor. The city is also identified as a place that achieves its identity through monumentality. The architectural distinction of the city is in part a use and justification for its being the repository of the accumulation of surplus, for which it requires administration, laws, and language. How was I to realize this as I began my Odessy on the streets of the Bronx? I noticed the structures, materials, spaces, textures, nodes and links. I did not see the history and cultural antecedents. M y parents and there families did not provide me with the answers and cultural connections. I did see in the forms for the building differences and noted the differences and references to foreign and non-American past. That was enough to build my vocabulary and experience for what I’d later experience in other cities both foreign and domestic.

Ingersoll adds that the origins of cities are mostly mythical. When I suggest that the origins of cities are mostly fictions, it may be of some comfort to consider that cities and written language appeared at the same time. The fact that one phenomenon serves the other has a certain symmetry. Writing, law and structure coincide in man’s ability to plan, design, plan, communicate, authorize and promulgate a patterned and mental vision.The first thing that strikes you about the origin of the city is the antithetical presentation of it as an almost unfortunate necessity. In most ancient mythologies, the golden age was set in the pre-urban past: the Garden of Eden, The Elysian fields, and Other natural paradises came before cities.

The illud tempus, for classical Civilization was pastoral, gathering acorns and drinking honey mead: these were times before cities, before writing, and before social strife; probably boring times, with no history, but allegedly very peaceful.

The pre-urban golden age is a mythological synopsis of the memory of the Neolithic hunter-gatherer existence. Often, sociologist and economist explain our affluence and consumerism using hunter’s hand to mouth values and methods of survival. What interrupted the happy idyll, and when was the first city built?

Agricultural Surplus, defense, and immorality

The Bible on the other hand already invests the origins of the city with the ethical problem by attributing it to Cain, who was also the first farmer, and was sent off to build cities after murdering his brother Abel. It is generally agreed upon that 1000 years of agricultural development and mastering of animal husbandry, the so-called agricultural revolution, preceded the formation of cities. The city is inconsciable (immoral) without this first factor of agricultural surplus. But it is also inconsciable without this other factor we can call discord. Cain was the first founder of a city, which is an act of defense of surplus, which was a paranoid act in his case since he was the aggressor against his hunter-gatherer brother.

The city's origin is steeped in fratricide (killing one’s brother) (a pattern that will be repeated in Rome), a consequence of the sort of discord that only humans are capable of. What the bible calls rebellion and disobedience. Man being gods and deifying there heroes. Looking for man’s leadership and strength to by hostility take, conquer and occupy territory and land. Further, to proclaim and bolster its claim and hold its position in the territories. Cities include water, food, hygienics, defense, communications, and places of assembly, worship, and habitation. The basic ingredients of a primitive military camp, fortress, settlement and complex long term trading and holding place. In fact Cain murdered Able to establish his relationship with God. If Cain is not here then God will love me more. Cain wanted to do things his way and God wanted Cain to know that Cain must give his best and not just what grows. Cain settled the difference by eliminating the God’s alternative and then was sent into the world.

Archaeologists, independently of the Bible and other legends, continue to shift the dates and sites of the earliest settlements: The remote past seems almost as uncertain as the remote future. Different types of cities began independently in at least 6 or 7 places around the globe: Jericho and Catal Huyuk around 8000-7000 BC; around 3,500BC in Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley, known as the Fertile Crescent; 2,550 in the Indus valley; 2000 in China; 1,500 in pre-Colombian America; And 1000 in Black Africa (notice that Europe is missing--it was the product of later colonization). Most of these primordial cities were linked to a river.

Not every city and urban center is intertwined with an infrastructure. Some are metaphoric gathering people of like minds, motives, fears and passions. The city is there monument and idol. It is worshiped and regarded as a god and means to salvation and protection. Some of them served purely religious functions. All of them existed because of a surplus, and created a class to administer and defend that surplus, the heirs of Cain, from whence the eternal cycle of inequality and fratricide plagues us.

Mesopotamia:

The first great urban culture, to which Western tradition clings tenaciously is that of the Semitic peoples in the Fertile Crescent. Cities moved down the Tygrus and Euphrates valley in search of more fertile and more peaceful surroundings. From 5000-3500 BC the practices of agriculture were refined, the plow introduced, irrigation rationalized, the means of transportation by sailboat and by cart regularized for trade, crafts such as pottery, metallurgy and weaving accompany this. These agriculturally based cities grew increasingly complex: leading to the stabilization of language: writing, math, the calendar, and observable natural phenomena such as astronomy were the outcome of new needs. Ur’s urban language paths lined shops.The paths cross at nodes and the intersections become points of reference. The areas of the city are distinguished by their edges, such as the walls, or the boundaries of the open space of Bakers Square.

Ur’s identity is gained through the presence of architectural landmarks, such as the Ziggurat or the city walls, which because of their scale or character set up a visual hierarchy that helps one get oriented in the city.First cities, and the possibility that they followed a language of urban form that was developing in tangent with a literary and administrative language with that strange Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which seems to moralize about the fact that the city's form and the city's language were bound in an act of hubris to threaten the godhead.

”Let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth. The lord said "behold the people is one and they have all one language, and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Let us go down then, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech...and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel"

It demonstrates the power of the city to organize itself through language and to create built statements. The city depends on language and the city is a language, and its power of constant transformation poses a theological threat, since god never changes but men do. The tower of Babel is the quintessential parable of hubris, and truly an architect's problem. We have continued to build the tower of Babel, especially since the cybernetic revolution has unified our language, and the consequences are probably equally frightening to a god that does not want to change. Hubris is the constant temptation of city builders, and language remains the only means of controlling it.

Death of Urbanity

World urban contexts preclude spiritual discussion, witnessing, behavior, and vocabulary insisting on commercial and secular business. Turning in error to the US constitution which separates religion from state, not spiritual from state. There are exceptions, such as Mecca, Medina, Rome, Shangrila, etc. In the tribulation God ends the tyranny of urbanity.

In our personal lives we end the tyranny by dyeing to the flesh and being born in the spirit.

World terrorism takes matters into its own hands to attack urbanism and commerce in the form of nations and states. They arrogantly take up what they believe is God’s cause.

As though suicide and murder will prevent some perceived evil. It is God’s, not men, will that we follow. Yet the idea of ending the urbane mind and replacing it with a spiritual mind persuades men to act out of God’s will.Jesus urges us to be in but not of the world for us to live in cities and amongst the urban mind. Paul often visited the Hellenist in Macedonia to present Christ and participate in urban creations. Urban creations are also in God’s will and as he allowed Samuel to give the Israelis their first king so he allows cities and urbanity.

We are free to choose. In choosing we let our urban mind die so our spiritual mind awakes.

In Revelation 18:2-24 John describes the fall of Babylon.

In this one prophesy the urban metaphor is defined and reified describing its physical and spiritual attributes. Even so, with all its wealth of bounty and products it is corrupted and in fact, ends. It ends when we choose to refocus our values but this ending described in prophecy is the physical reality of its ending and the ending of all such metaphors and there manifestations.
City types are likewise based on culture and religion. My colleagues at KFU taught me a great deal about Arab and Muslim cities and I could compare them to the western models.Urban People are persons whose origin is the city, being raised and educated in the city. As an urban person he will still behave urban and city-like when in residing in suburbia or rural contexts. This characteristic helps us to understand that both being urban and urban is as the “church”, not a place but a people.

In other words when we try to describe the city and urbanity we flounder about at describing the artifacts, stimuli, bricks and mortar substituting material and substance for what is the underlying true nature of the urban and city experience. Even Jane Jacobs and other great urbanists exert their genius describing the temple and tool with out describing the faith and belief. For that is what it is to be urban. It is as precious as being a farmer, industrialist or Mormon.

When you say I am a New Yorker, or from Chicago, Parisian, Roman: one understands that one is dealing with a bigger than life concept. The concept of a city boy (or girl). Movies, songs, plays, poem, books are written about the sports, commerce, schooling, slums, fires, hardships and victories of city life.Urban people live with a higher degree of stress, speed, ambiguity, and confrontation. Even urban conversation is different. Some one once said that a New Yorker thinks you’ve lost interest in his conversation if you do not interrupt. New Yorker's are not apt to speak in sentences but blurbs of headlines and ideas, which get completed by and interactive, interrupted and dynamic exchange of one liners and innuendos. Attitudes and ideas flash and become the food for intellects, creativity and invention. Entrepreneurs, anarchists. Politicians and artists thrive amongst such communications because they fill the gaps with there own craft.

Prestige and identity

Urbanites want a city address. And, in a city want a prestige address in the city. In a neighborhood identifying them with their particular expectation, potential and opportunity. It may be an ethnic identity, historical identity, professional, or status identity. Urbanites are pernicious and preditorial in optimizing using location, neighborhood for status and achieving societal goals. Goals, well advertised and distributed by gossip media, and published standards. Christina was particularly interested in this subject along with the cloths we wore and the places we would visit. And, particularly, the decoration of our home. People in cities identify with citizenship and prestige; e.g. Aspen Vail, Washington, DC, Princeton, Cape cod (where thanksgiving started); Philadelphia, Monticello, etc. Indeed, the urban heart and mind is complex and irrational because it is sewn in man’s creation and his fantasies.

Urbanism is illusive and mysterious and the stuff great mysteries and novels have been penned. Such novels and legends as Sherlock Holmes, Jack the ripper, King Kong; the cities of Diana in Ephesus and Helen of Troy’s, Paris, etc. My book on European cities is filled with descriptions of the people and the streets, neighborhoods, transportation systems and markets they exude and use. The urbanite loves, knows and serenades his city with song, poems, descriptions, paintings, dance operas, ballets, etc. They celebrate the world they have created and with religion welcome God and incorporate Him in there speech, customs, and vocabulary. Just as the church worships and celebrates God’s grace and their salvation so urban man his context.Many of the cities I have visited have focused there planning on the presence of the church and God in America the New England nine square villages and European cities. There are neighborhoods in New York where the church or synagogue is the focal point; but commercial buildings overwhelm all of this. And, as the spires of the bell towers in Sienna, Italy and the call towers of mosques the high rise and merchant buildings roof line shouts for preeminent prestige. Names like Paramount, Gibraltar, Summit, etc. are part of the building lexicon.

,ideal city,new Jerusalem,tribulation,Atlantis,Garden of Eden,Babel,Harlem,
South Bronx,Shangrila,Ephesians,Sherlock Holmes,city address,,Blog Flux Local - Florida

The Passion of Urbanity by Barie Fez-Barringten: Leture 5

2008-05-31T10:08:00.000-07:00

The Passion of Urbanity

by Barie Fez-Barringten

www.bariefez-barringten.com

Urban people are enamored with the “city” and although they disagree about many things, their disagreements are individualistic and contentious. The the only thing they agree upon is to disagree; they have agreed to disagree. They are introverted, petty, and vulgar (or sophisticated) and share a vision of cooperating in a common vocabulary reaching for the sky and demonstrating their ability to be powerful and “god-like”. They are the individuals expressed in Greek dances and mythology.

Urbanites are the center and every place else uses them as a model. They, the city and the collective persons with the urban fabric are, not only right, but also possess a power of place and collective wisdom and resources. They seem to have a super-natural authority and collective self righteousness. They are like the "royalty " of the feudal period where those living outside the "city" wall emulated the court and the court emulated the king and his inner circle. They know and can decide about the trends, fashion, arts, fiancée, products and consumers needs and desires. None of the above may bear itself out in fact but the allusion to being god-like permeates and fans the flame of the fantasy. The urbanite envisions the world with them at its center and emanating rays of light, products, words, songs, sounds, ideas, force, design, engineering, science, technology, religion, medical cures, healing, etc.

The urban person is a believer in the world and its potential to keep and hold mankind. Art flourishes in the urban environment because it is where creative like- minded artisans and craftsman are born, raised and hone their craft on the challenges and demands of the market. As Renaissance kings and royalty hired and fostered artisans, so do the cities and urban populations provide fertile ground for invention, innovation, design, thought, ideas, etc. Along with artisans there are poets and writers who provide a libretto and describe the scenario of the urban context.Such a person was Frederich Neitcszhe. There is a Keller (cellar) in Leipzig, which still announces that this is the place where Neitcszhe spent most of his time carousing and eating.

About Neitcszhe, David Hildebrand says that the "death of God" is a way of saying that humans are ceasing to believe in a cosmic order. Urbanity focuses on man and his accomplishments leaving little for God. It is filed with its own efforts and identity and not any generalized biblical truth about moral and ethical values. It is where man and man’s law reigns. It is also where crime and violence proliferate. Nietzsche personified urbanity and its ultimate conclusion. His philosophy and proclamations viewed with the urban city as metaphor seems appropriate. The mind that contributes to the urban context is capable of reading the obvious. That in the urban context God has not been considered nor made part of the design.

The urban context is a kind of sanctuary from God by an urban mind focused on the man made designed and built environment. The observation of the death of God is not a prophecy but a reification of the urban intent and contextual mind. In this way these kinds of writings are artistic observations of an already existent and pervasive evil. Neitcszhe believes that what looks like an ordered and rational universe is merely human beings, projecting on to chaos an order they themselves made up out of a desperate and emotional need to find purpose in the universe. It is very much of what an urban is. All is chaos--men invent order and impose it on the world--they come to think the order was really there in the first place--then they come to see through the order they invented and all beliefs of morality and order begin to break down. It is Baghdad, Paris, London, Munich, Berlin New York, et al.

The more I learned about the world and its rationales the more I realized that the scale, breadth and scope of little Barie’s undertaking was monumental and breadth taking. How I’d ever enter the field to form and shape cities I’d have to leave to God. It would be God and He only that could bring order to chaos and a world in His will. I began to see my quest lie not in this dispensation of God’s goodness, but in His dispensation of the Millennium and Eternal kingdom. The more science learns about the universe the more order it finds. God describes the formation of the Universe and His creation and it is ordered and not chaotic.

So the "death of God" leads, Neitcszhe to not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic/physical order but also a rejection of absolute values themselves--to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law. Every person will be a law unto himself or herself--anything goes and all is permitted. Most of the world’s anarchist, dictators and leaders of rogue states follow this approach.
Since most in the European west were brought up believing that values come from belief in a higher power, in a higher order, the recognition that God is dead will not only cause him to lose faith in Christian values--compassion, charity, respect for moral laws--it will cause a loss of faith in all values. And disbelief in all values will result in the sense of purposelessness and emptiness in existence itself.

This is nihilism. In other words, the breakdown in the belief in Christian moral values exposes humans to the danger of nihilism, not because there are no other possible values, but because most people, in the West at least, know of no others. There is only a "will to" or "will for" something. This is the basic feature of life. It is the basic drive of humanity. I believe art is an act of anarchy but art is not life. Life is an act of subordination to the will of God. The Ubermensch is the repudiation of conformity to any single norm. It is the antithesis of mediocrity and stagnation. This complicates the city infrastructure with edifices that exude the face of the self made man and his accomplishments. It produces the icons of commerce and industry.

The Ubermensch, then, is the one who has overcome his animal nature, organized the chaos of his passions, sublimated his impulses, and given style to his character. I tried to impose this discipline upon my self from 1960 to 1968 and found I had the opposite results; I went further from my goals and god’s will. The world over whelmed me. Evil was too formidable and I was not about to subscribe to Satan. I concluded that this was the ultimate in Satan’s plan to win and defeat a child of God. He has created himself; he has become free through the will to power.

Maturing in the Bronx, I could not synthesize the Neitzche’s observations but I knew the same pervasive evil and absence of God. Antichrist and atheism is inherently rampant and inbred in the structured of cities whose backbone is commerce and whose highest and most majestic buildings are not churches and temples but banks and offices. It is no wonder this view was adapted by the Nazis to explain there nihilistic, immoral and evil use of the urban mechanism to gain and hold power. The industrial revolution permeating the context and times, which Nietzsche observed, was indeed absent of God and subject to anarchy.

It followed that I should read and know Ayn Rand. I wanted to know what I supposed to think as an architect destined to reach meteoric professional; heights. Ayn Rand in the fountainhead repeats much of this philosophy and total sovereignty of the anarchical self. I believe both Rand and Nietsczhe’s observed a Godless society of hypocrites, capitalists, entrepreneurs and greedy politicians. They translated extent society into stories and thesis, but, the underlying trueth is the same evil that is in the world, and, without God at the helm anarchy brings chaos and bedlam. Nothing is more apt to describe the end times than these writers.

Logos and the Urban Myth

Working for Gulf Oil Corporation and writing its policies and procedures for Projects management I was taught the corporations “delegation of Authority”. It was biblical and full of power. It was the concept I was later to discover when I taught contact law for individuals and non-human and human personas to take title , transfer and hold property. It was the sole and heart behind man to incorporate and form non-human persons and to build and form infrastructures and institutions,. It allowed banks to receive deposits and invest and collect fees and disburse profits to gain further profits. It was all by the power of logos. Jesus has given us himself and in us He is a very powerful to build and grow a spiritual body known as the “church” It was when I discovered God’s logos (Jesus, the Word) that my life changed. Logos was a term used in Greecean Rome to connote sovereign contractual authority and power. and It had been used as secular term by the governments.It was this term that the Apostles redefined being the God incarnate as Emanuel.Meaning that the word is God made into flesh and given to us for our eternal life. The ultimate author of everything. The author who authorized us to the word.

This logos comes from God and is not “god-like “, magic, or mystical.It is the word of God and when spoken it does heal, bless and change the world.This was introduced into the urban contexts of Rome, Jerusalem, Ephesus, etc.The Word Became Flesh After being indoctrinated by Yoga gurus about the power and sound of mantras and the spoken word I understood this easily. Bari Paul’s testimony of his conversion from Hinduism is similar to my experience in this regard.The impact, significance of the word and its power to create is explained by John:
John 1: ¹In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was with God in the beginning.

John 12:⁴⁷"As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it.

⁴⁸There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day. ⁴⁹For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it.

⁵⁰I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say."

It is the word that cause the universe, our planet and world to be, change and grow, The word impacts both structure and social order.

²⁴"I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.

John 5:³⁷And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form,

³⁸nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent.

³⁹You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me,

John 8:¹⁶But if I do judge, my decisions are right, because I am not alone. I stand with the Father, who sent me. ¹⁷In your own Law it is written that the testimony of two men is valid. ¹⁸I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me."

Paul too valued the logos, saying in Romans10:

⁸But what does it say? "The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart," that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming:

⁹That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

¹⁰For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.

¹³for, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."

Salvation includes mortal and immortal, carnal and spiritual and world and universe. It impacts everything and is not limited by time and space. It is god’s will for man and the poser He gave to us. It is so powerful that He brought down Babel and separated men’s tongues form one another so that they would not be unified and would rely upon His word and not there own. Still there individual word is powerful.

Urban city god-like vs. Jesus Christ:
1 John 4: ¹Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

²This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God,

³but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.
⁴You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.

⁵They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them.

⁶We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spiritof truth and the spirit of falsehood”.

The logos is God’s spoken word, not mans. I believed that man’s word would change my life and I would be secure and successful. I did this with my architectural license and ordination as a minister of the gospel. Both have frustrated this desire for a “shoe-in” to one of man’s professions. As an urban product indoctrinated into the urban myth by Homer, Nietzsche, Rynd and others I imagined myself as a professional beyond my practical and mundane means. This meant that once I was licensed I would be a kind of world knight and the world would super naturally draft me into its service.

I bought into the Rynd's and Nitcshe’s notions of man as god and more that man could do it all with out God because of his innate will to be.

I even made “will” as one of the three parts of what made man (brain, will and appetite).

Urbanism Tolerates

Urbs contain a people from a variety of contexts that migrate from other contexts; countries, rural and sub urban and other urban units. They come to settle and are attracted by the opportunity, benefits, and quality potential. They often find more potential and possibilities than actual reality, but stay and strive to remake and shape the context into the imagined likeness. The urbanite tolerates and accepts non-natives and places on condition that they melt, and, like them, adapt to the righteous accepted norms and mores of the urban context.

There are horrible exceptions as when two conflicting nationalities and so-called races clash and wage was against each other. Gang wars fighting for “turf” and squabbles are one of the characteristics of the urban context. Turf wars,hostile squatting, and adversarial equipoise are in the nature of the urb.

Yes, they may speak one language but unless they also surrender their rights to being peculiar they will clash. I can recall being in gunfights between blacks and Puerto Ricans on a block in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. I was sitting in the back seat monitoring the night watch as part of my research to design my Yale thesis: A precinct police station”. As we turned the corner we could see and hear the gunfire coming from various fire escapes and windows of the five story tenements forming a canyon on both sides of the street. We pulled over and I was told to duck. Before leaving the car they called for back and told me to duck in the back seat. After about 15 minutes I got out of the car and went tot a phone both just a few feet from where the patrol car was parked and called Christina. I gave her a detailed description of what I was and heard and then quickly got back in the car. The duel was between blacks living one side of the street with Puerto Ricans living on the other. The issue of this fight was that someone had relations with someone’s woman.

Communal interest clash with private interests which urbanity tends to ignore. It is only the wealthy and fortunate that can live in urban contexts with enough private space

On the social side, when people are concentrated in one place, it's theoretically easier to link them to schools,
health care, and other key services. Throughout history, higher levels of health and education have come after periods of urbanization.
Compared to higher forms of government, local government is smaller and closer to the people, so organized citizens have a better chance of changing the status quo.
This can be seen in NYC councilman, boroughs, police precincts, etc.  
In, Saudi, religious police, police, National Guard are local,
and Europe has a system of street and block mayor’s who hold the keys to buildings and precincts,
which register residents and visitors.

About the Infrastructure and on the environmental side, water, materials, food, and fuels currently course through cities and end up as wastes -- as garbage in dumps or pollutants in the soil, air, or water. But these one-way flows could be redirected in circular pathways. Although it is usually not the case today, people clustered together could use fewer materials, and recycle them with greater ease, than widely dispersed populations. Compact urban areas reduce the energy needed for transportation and the materials needed for various types of infrastructure.

Transportation, communication, computer and other technologies have had an impact on cities and what we define as urban. For example the below are technologies that affected urban manifestations.

In 1903, Otis introduced the design that would become the "backbone" of the elevator industry: the gearless traction electric elevator, engineered and proven to outlast the building itself. This ushered in the age of high-rise structures, ultimately including New York's Empire State Building and World Trade Center, Chicago's John Hancock Center, and Toronto's CN Tower. Before our cities went "out," they went "up" -- because the elevator could take them there. The central business districts (CBDs), principally in our Northern and eastern cities, developed vertically during the first half of the century as growth and demand for those spaces increased, and the value of the dirt dictated the trend. The CBD came about as our nation's work changed from the farm to the factory and the office.

Another technology that facilitated urbanism was air-conditioning. One of the first buildings in America to be air-conditioned was Carnegie Hall, 100 years ago. Because of the Great Depression and the demands of World War II, air conditioning did not hit its stride until the early 1950s. But when it hit, its impact rapidly gave rise to the great Sunbelt migration of the second half of the century. Cities such as Houston, Phoenix and Atlanta can trace their growth roots to the air conditioner, which enabled people to comfortably live and travel in the inhospitable summer climates of the South. Gerald Hines, the developer of Houston’s Galleria sold air-conditioners before developing real estate.
But it wasn't until World War II that a south-oriented and a bi-coastal United States really came into being. Cities, such as Riyadh, Jeddah, Dubai and others in the tropics would not develop and attract people form all over the world with air-conditioning.

Urban Odessy: Urban experience in Europe

Many of the European Cities I visited in Europe were originally kingdoms and vested with the pride and identity of noble founders. Most of the cities have become complex commercial centers reeking with god-emulating characteristics and worldliness. It is precisely these attributes formed into the building’s heights, widths and networks of streets that make them habitable. Gifted with a complex set of resources and functions most of the cities contain the urban characteristics of people proud and knowledgeable about their context. The Italian cities have urbanites particularly willing to not only teach you there language and vocabulary but also educate you about there street, landmarks, and history.

German and Nordic cities formed as merchant crossings as trade routes. These tend to be less egotistical and purposeful in their urban attitudes. Business and Religion dominate their persona and inhabitants attitudes. These urban cities without eccentricity.

Each place the native can tell about their city and in the telling there is the persona of urbanism. But in general most of the cities are the results of feuds, controversies, and strife between kings, counts, duchess, and other royalty whose quest for identity, godliness or God-like-ness led them to control and hold villages and provinces. These feudal lords protected and housed peasants who inhabited, surrounded and leaned into these places for recourse and protection. These places all commonly owe their design and artifacts to the royalty who trained and hired the best artisans to craft palaces, plazas, utilities, roads, etc. Many planted here visions on Roman grids and ruins.

Lucca

A typical Italian city, which I have visited, is Lucca. The first historical traces of Lucca can be dated back to the Paleolithic period. Afterwards the Romans inhabited by the Ligurians, the Etruscans and in the III century this area. In 180 B.C. it became a Latin colony. The geometrical layout of the town and the Roman Forum can be dated back to this period.
During the barbaric domination Lucca was the capital of the Longobard reign until the IX century.
A lot of beautiful and luxury buildings and towers are still today a sign of the prosperity the town enjoyed in that period. Many such Italian cities share similar characteristics such as Padua, Sienna, Pisa, etc. You can see the list of the cities I have visited and sketched in the recreation travel section of this work.

Cultural Transmission: Promulgating Romance:

Prof. John Muccigrosso writes that Rome’s "Wonders of the City", come down to us from the XII century, and images and ideas of Rome continue to fascinate today. A belief that the arts contain and communicate the "genetic code" of civilization is very old. Knowing that the city, which was considered the center of the western world for thousands of years, has always been seen as the duty of all cultivated men and women, what does the heritage of the ancient world mean to present-day Italy and to the West? Reputation and history play an important role in the urbanity of a city. It is an invisible characteristic, often manifested by landmark buildings, churches, temples, coliseums, markets, bridges, towers, libraries, etc.

Pisa, in turn, was one of the earliest sites of the re-birth of the ancient world known to us as the Renaissance. Architects, artists and writers began in earnest to turn to the civilization of the ancient Romans for inspiration and learning. The example of this smaller, vibrant city, seat of some of the greatest institutions of higher learning in Europe, can teach us much about the contemporary reception of the ancient world. Understanding the urban history of Rome and Pisa, and visiting the well-preserved ancient city of Pompeii helps us appreciate what cultural transmission means, what our civilization has considered important. Closely interacting with people responsible for preserving this heritage and observing modern life in these ancient places, we will study the local economy and observe ways of seeing the past in archeological parks, museums, excavations and popular culture.

Governments deciding to create urban centers and then fostering this migration, construction, etc. is part of the political process of keeping and preserving political power by creating and meeting expectations.

As the population increases governments must urbanize and support the creation and maintenance of infrastructures and the support services. Comparing Saudi Arabia and other states the trend in Ethiopia is typical, which were under-urbanized, even by African standards. In the late 1980s, only about 11 percent of the population lived in urban areas of at least 2,000 residents. In Saudi Arabia the Rural-to-urban migration. In three main areas have increased in urban population by some very significant amount?

In Ethiopia, there were hundreds of communities with 2,000 to 5,000 people; Ethiopia's relative lack of urbanization is the result of the country's history of agricultural self-sufficiency, which has reinforced rural peasant life. The slow pace of urban development continued until the 1935 Italian invasion. Urban growth was fairly rapid during and after the Italian occupation of 1936-41. Urbanization accelerated during the 1960s, when the average annual growth rate was about 6.3 percent. Urban growth was especially evident in the northern half of Ethiopia, where most of the major towns are located. This formed another country and government called Eritrea. There were many Eritreans in Saudi.

Having designed the Addis Abba Hilton for my Pratt thesis and ministered the gospel to Ethiopians and Eretrians, I studied some of the characteristics of its capital. Addis Ababa was home to about 35 percent of the country's urban population in 1987. Another 7 percent resided in Asmera, the second largest city.

Christina and I have lived and worked in cities and villages, which have become cities and then urban centers; such as College Station, Bryan, Jackson, Tennessee, etc. This change is notably induced and nurtured by inexpensive and below market land values; very reasonable cost of power and accessible water. Much the same can be said for other cosmopolitan urban centers such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, etc. These are cities, which did not rely upon foreign trade and migration as simply rural communities shutting down and immigrating to the “big city”. This prosperity and gain as the engine driving the growth of urban centers is not always sustained or maintained.Such a machine drove England’s meteoric surge to colonial superpower.

For example: “Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves.
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves”

In 1887,Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee; the Independent Labour Party was founded and The British East Africa Company was chartered and Britain's rise to a world power meant that she found interests everywhere. Not only was she now head of the self-governing colonies, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand (mostly settled by British newcomers in addition to the relatively tiny native populations); but also the vast Empire of India and a veritable host of dependent territories all over the world's oceans. Most of these had been acquired somehow to protect the merchants and traders of England, or areas in which their missionaries and explorers (mostly Scots such as self-promoting David Livingstone or English brave hearts such as Richard Burton and John Speke) had established their outposts.

Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister in 1874 with the idea of expanding the Empire and taking up the "White Man's Burden" (as Rudyard Kipling described it) to not only create trade and bring profit, but also to spread British ideas of democracy and law, as well as the Christian (and Protestant) religion.

1901: The End of an Era
In 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated her diamond jubilee. She died in 1901. Britain had undergone enormous changes in the 60 years of her reign. It had become the workshop of the world, yet, to many of its inhabitants, the days of prosperity and optimism were over, the future was uncertain. Commerce was flourishing, industrial productivity was booming, exports were soaring, the nation led the world in manufacturing, the Empire had expanded across the globe.

The great movement in population from the countryside to the towns and the urban squalor and poverty it created has been well documented by such writers as Charles Dickens.

The anthem of the later Empire was a vocal version of Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance No. 1. It is still sung lustily every year at the last night of the “Proms” (the Promenade Concerts held at the Royal Albert Hall every year since 1895) — though this year, because that night fell on September 15th, Sir Edward’s “rumbustious jollity” was felt to be inappropriate, and was replaced by the American national anthem.

Yet while all that pomp made the Empire a very impressive thing to look upon, circumstance was eating away at the foundations. The whole thing was, as Cannadine explains very masterfully, really just an escapist romantic fantasy, a flight from the horrors and uncertainties of urbanization and modernization into the slow rural rhythms, the comforting hierarchies, costumes and rituals of feudal Britain. Dining with his Indian princes, a Viceroy could forget the industrial unrest back home.

Rule Britannia is not the British national anthem -- that is God Save the Queen -- but it is about Britain in an important way that the other song is not. Brtain became a Great Power, and was prosperous and safe, because of the Royal Navy. Because the Navy really did "rule the waves," British commerce, industry, and empire became the envy of the world -- suppressing piracy and the slave trade, and producing the Pax Britannica of the 19th century. At the same time, British parliamentary forms, the rule of law, and natural rights became ideals that even the British did not always live up to. And the English language became the lingua franca of the world.

The song began with a poem, "Rule Britannia," by James Thomson. It was put to music by Thomas Augustine Arne and was first performed in 1740.

In truth, however, the Royal Navy was the greatest navy of history, and its rule of the waves the most benevolent and beneficent, let alone most universal, of any power ever. Britain was envied for her colonial possessions, which were seen as the source of her power; but it is clear now that this was of limited economic value. Britain was strong from having an entrepreneurial tradition and a free and open market, to an extent that no country in the world has today. Indeed, countries are always worrying about "protecting" themselves. At its height, Britain knew that free trade was its best protection.

We may describe and attribute urban characteristics to the context or the people but with out a balance of affordable housing, employment, business opportunity and the potential to develop spiritually in a secure and healthy environment the urban context has failed.

Yet, history shows that there never been a “perfect” urban context. For example, Jerusalem at the time of Christ.

And in that imperfection urbanity has thrived and people prospered and grew. Now analysis of one or another urban context is complete with considering what has happened in lives such as ours. That is affluentism and mobility. These two factors are inherently key to bringing talent and creativity into forming urbanism as well as continuing the myth of the successful and resourceful city place. The ability of the context to change and adopt is no more important than its ability to let its prodigy’s branch out, migrate and relocate.

Urban places also house the most successful and creative people in the world who like people like the Rockefellers and building and metroplex creators of the twentieth century.

For example, what do you do when rent or mortgage payments well exceed one’s ability to earn; the answer is to change one’s metaphoric expectations of acceptable neighborhoods, amenities, etc and adopt new professions and skills in order to survive and succeed. This crisis of choice keeps many people in their current urban context. Inventing and reinventing themselves while others loosen there ties to the urban context and follow rural migrants to other growing urban contexts. The latter has been our path. A path which has led to hopscotching contexts and being part of contextual metamorphosis. Both building and art have been our urban calling cards into new environments. We have traded our original urban context for a matrix of amenities. Urbanity for us has been a combination of memories and supplantaitons of urban manner and ways to new contexts, urban or not. We have practiced making metaphors wherever we lived, including Saudi Arabia, Puerto Rico, Jackson, etc. Travels to foreign lands has been in search of urban variations and nuances as a gourmet seeks new a delicious foods and wines so our travels have led us to mix and match our urban origins with those of new urban contexts. To actually learn alternative urban myths and perceive unique and peculiar urban artifacts, building elements and lifestyles.

Urbanity should not be confused with Utopia. It is not a place or people perfected or trying to be perfect but to compress as many diverse, complex and useful recourses and opportunities into as an efficient functional system benefiting the haves and have nots.

National Anthems of Urban Nations demonstrated the “hype” and strivings of founding fathers to synthesize urbanity and world order.

Here are a few of the major ones:

France:

The Marseillaise may just be the greatest national anthem. It is certainly one of most stirring, but also one of the most sanguinary. It originated during the French Revolution, but did not permanently become the anthem of France until 1879.

Germany

The history of the German national anthem is an ironic one. Composed by a nationalist and a republican, Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, in 1841, it represented everything that was officially fronded upon in contemporary Germany, as the author himself composed the song in exile (on Heligoland, at the time a British possession). The country was not unified -- just the German Confederation -- and its governments were very far from being republics. Originally called Das Lied der Deutschen (or Das Deutschlandlied, "Song of the Germans/of Germany"), the common title is just from the first line of the song. It originally meant, therefore, the unity of Germany over all its existing divisions, not the triumph of Germany over everyone else including its great urban centers as Berlin, Dresden, Frankfurt, and Munchen.

What everyone thinks of as the German national anthem, Deutschland über Alles, had no official recognition until 1922. The version in Liechtenstein is still used there

England:

God Save the Queen (with King substituted in the appropriate reign) is the customary, but unofficial, national anthem of Great Britain. The words and music are officially considered to be of anonymous origin. Many claims are made.

United States of America

The great national anthem of the United States of America, the Star-Spangled Banner, was a poem written by Francis Scott Key after observing the attempt of the British in 1814 to bombard into submission

After his poem was published, it began to be sung to an already existing tune, often said (sometimes disparagingly) to have been an old drinking song (To Anacreon in Heaven). Only the third verse, which no one seems to know or sing, even mentions blood, which is actually in the chorus of the French anthem Urban centers such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and others. WE do not regard many of the smaller units as urban and we call them towns such as ST Augustine, Augusta, Charlotte, etc. Many of the New England colony, nine square centered villages were never urban, just settlements that grew into villages, towns and cities.

Australia:

And the one taught to me by speech and voice teacher at Columbia University is Waltzing Matilda which gives us such Urban centers as Brisbane and Sydney.

Although it has no official status, and an official national anthem does exist for Australia (Advanced Australia Fair, adopted 1984), Waltzing Matilda is certainly the most beloved Australian national song, and internationally recognizable as well. Andrew Barton “Banjo” Patterson (1864-1941) wrote it in 1895 while visiting a sheep station in Queensland, based on some local stories he heard. It was an instant success.

It is wonderful example of a myth becoming the focus of national unity and ultimately urbanity.

Whatever its origins and the fate of the intellectual property, the song encapsulates so much about Australians: a highly urban society of people who like to think of themselves as rugged, independent country folk, standing up against authority. (For an encore, I'd better pull together some lit. crit. on Crocodile Dundee...).

Cities driven by Culture, Religion and Philosophy

(3,909 words)

The Arab-Islamic City compared to Hellenistic Cities

Islamic cities are antithetical to Hellenistic Urbanism because public institutions, public spaces, and coordinated street patterns were unnecessary under Islam because of the new emphasis on local justice and the importance of community.

Although the Prophet Mohammed, who was a merchant and thus urbanized, was against nomadic existence. Most of the early converts to the new religion, which he began formulating in 610, were of nomadic origin and related to this floating pattern of life.

The Arab-Islamic City, which occasionally was built as an occupation of earlier, but usually was built ex-novo, retains something of the nomad's life in its patchwork of communities. Instead of colonnaded streets and clearly encoded space like the Hellenistic City. The Arab-Islamic City was made of an infinite number of fragments, not clearly connected on the ground plane.

The organization of the city fabric was somewhat like the ceramic decorations of the mosques with their interlacing patterns.

There was a strong sense of orientation in Islamic cities that came from above, like the nomad's reliance on the position of the stars to navigate the deserts: all Arab- Islamic cities are characterized by their observance of the orientation to Mecca, known as the quibla. All prayers and thus all buildings for prayer are directed that way, and when a believer dies he is buried facing Mecca.

So while the fabric of the city appears incredibly incoherent and snarled, there is an underlying spiritual order that compensates with its directness.

No matter how complicated the street pattern in an Islamic city may be, you can always find your way to Mecca.

Further, is the whole issue of the Arab and Islamic codes and of sharing private and semi private spaces and yielding rights of ways to public and community use. The degrees and uses of such spaces and how they are negotiated and agreed. Much of the customs of keeping women and the family private and the sharing of right of ways shapes the village and is the net work upon which the city is built. It infrastructure exudes from within and not a geometry imposed upon the network.

We should understand that I have not even begun to describe the Chines, Korean, Japanese and other Oriental or African City and urban types. Suffice it to say that these types are well beyond the analogies of my personal context and cultural antecedents. The Arabic, philippino and Indian cities I have experienced are a combination of western and eastern concepts. The predominant and over riding eastern concept is bases on a series of laws and ethics dealing with socialization and orderly interaction of presumably differing tribes and interested on sharing and negotiating time and space.

The western model is a base likewise on codes, ordinances and laws governing health safety and welfare. But like the forest for trees such differences divert us away from the key societal practices and cultures.

Renaissance Cities

Rome, Warsaw, Dresden, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Paris were the most notably planned and organized around the church, central plazas and monuments to man’s exuberance, potential and victory over nature.

Take the castle in Frances Loire valley designed for the French Queen who loved the city, but for safety and security had to have her palace build well away from Paris. What did she do? She had a miniature village of streets and shops built on her rooftop fully manned, staffed and filled with merchants and merchandise. She would daily ambulate this roof top metaphor enjoying the street filed with members of her court and the merchants to appease and satiatiate her passion for urban life. It was not a mall but a replica of urbanity she desired.

These Royal mansions, castles and palaces housed not only the royal family and their servants, but there court and offices and officers; often the militia and security forces, not to mention bakers, cooks, crafts man, maintenance and repair personnel. Most of these facilities are not unlike the most complex hotels, hospitals and other public buildings with a back and front of the house design separating and facilitating the living from the hidden support and administration.

I have visited and drawn most of these facilities after having first studied them in school. Actually seeing them was a lifetime memory and helpful to understand the architectural and management work I did in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere

The towers, the turrets, the cupolas, the gables, the lanterns, the chimneys, look more like the spires of a city than the salient points of a single building. You emerge from the avenue and find yourself at the foot of an enormous fantastic mass. Chambord has a strange mixture of society and solitude. A little village clusters within view of its stately windows and a couple of inns near by offer entertainment to pilgrims.

The King of France, François I, passed a good part of his childhood to the Castle of Amboise and since the beginning of its reign it is often with the Castle of Blois with his wife, Claude, of France.

The largest of the Loire château and considered one of the most extraordinary structures in Europe, Chambord sits in the middle of a 13,000-acre royal game forest. Begun by François I in 1519, it took 12 years to build and required 1,800 workers, there are 440 rooms and 365 chimneys on the roof.

The town, enclosed by massive walls supported by towers, lay below the fortress, --for the chateau served, in fact, as fort and pleasure-house. Above the town, with its blue-tiled, crowded roofs extending then, as now, from the river to the crest of the hill which commands the Right Bank,

Luther, as Paul, expressed his concern about the “right” behavior amongst communities of believers and non-believers. Luther’s works set out rules of individual and societal behavior and civilization based upon the bible. Luther links urban and city commerce and associated politeness with Paul’s epistles and usefulness in winning souls and living blessed lives. Being in the inner circle, citizen, protected, one accord, clique was “right” Outside of this was not right.

Luther links urban conditions to God’s word and our behavior “in” but not “of” the world. Urban life involves pluralism, opportunity, edification, simultaneity, and discernment rather than discrimination. Urbanity relates to people of all nations (Peter’s episode with the sheet of mixed animals and then meeting people in Jerusalem).

Also, most of the bible takes place in cities and amongst urban dwellers and settlers. Urban people are people of commerce and are “urbane” citizens having manners, refinement and polish. Urban people are regarded as the ambassadors of a town; they are civil, courteous.They are the people living with in the wall and under the protection of the Lord of the land. As the Italian cities formed by wars between Kings and kingdom many of Germany's cities formed by trade. Saudi cities are filled with people unconcerned with the governance and vitality of the city. They are like squatters and inhabitants of a Roman or Feudal city where the life depends on legal law and rules and not on the people’s agreement to t settle and thrive.

It is in cities whose people are spiritually or commercially motivated do you see urbanism exude its character and personality. Tehran as an extreme and today’s southern and northern Iraqi cities are good examples. It is the people followed by the form around them. The people build and run the shops, streets, and utilities, which incorporate there, needs and make the city into a tool. It is the tool of the people that we see in urban life. As form follows function and the church is not the building but the bride of Christ so is life and vitality of cities and their urban overtones.

It is only these people who wish to attract trade and compete in commerce that form the unique cultures and character of each urban setting. But, most have the same features, but in different ways as entertainment, religion, hotels, housing, food, arts and some taut things “you can’t get else where such as locally made crafts, foods, spices, etc.

The city was originally “civatele” being a place occupied by citizens. It was the Romans in their program of global settlement and colonization who built new town and cities with standard elements in standard designs according to a uniform set of rules and “architectural Order”. People were then placed in these places and conducted themselves as urbanites living a “state righteous” way of life. I saw Pompeii and Pastum and its standard building types such as streets on compass axis, standard atrium single and multiple family housing, central theaters, market, forum, etc. These settlements were clones of the roman model. As a child I remember a city filled with immigrants, siblings of immigrants and those that claimed to come over on the mayflower. The mayflower must have been the size of America’s largest aircraft carriers judging by the numbers of people who have made that claim.

My family were the immigrants and our access to what was going on was, as it were, from the bottom of the fish barrel. What we could know or see came from gossip ad hearsay. Few in my family took the time nor interest to discover America. Most of my questions went ignored and unanswered. The mind to know these things went unnoticed and ignored. Most saw me as too inquisitive and needlessly curious. One of the factors we considered in creation of our name was its potential as a historic and cultural link to our ancestors and a place in history.

Antonella Roversi Monaco"I Segreti delle Cattedrali"(De Vecchi Editore, Milano) says, "If the city is the place where God rests, the cathedral is the place, where in the same time, his creatures can rest. Originally God manifested himself in natural phenomena and only later did men retain that the same God should be contained, held and honored in a more appropriate setting. They founded the cities so that they should become His residence and manifestation.

Finally it was found necessary to build a temple, a delimited place where God could stay comfortably and men with him." God never requested this; in fact he commanded David and others not to build a temple or place to limit and contain Him. Containing, limiting and housing God is an absurd and spiritualy immature idea.

Antonella Roversi Monaco in "I segreti delle Cattedrali"(De Vecchi Editore, Milano) also said, “ In 'De Civitate Dei' Saint Augustine, church father and authoritative philosopher, distinguishes two cities, one terrestrian and the other one celestial. The first one is a human construction, imperfect by nature, with deviations and defects, and the second one follows the laws of perfection and is governed by love for God, our fellow-citizens and ourselves. The cathedral can be considered an earthly manifestation, almost a reflection of God's city. She is in fact a monument which produces positive effects and leads the visitors to attitudes which can liberate him from the narrowness of human logic, suggesting that freedom of divine origin is within human reach." The word of God resounds against such thinking teaching that the word resides in each believer and not in God’s or man’s creations. We are to worship God, creator, and not creations. Our freedom form principality of evil, Lucifer and sin is Jesus. Not man’s creations! Jesus died on the cross to nail; our sins and set the captives free. He is free is free indeed. Not because of cities and temples. They may be man’s tools but they are not God’s. His tool is “logos” and “Holy Spirit”.

Jerusalem:

The metaphor of this city has been applied to towns, hamlets and villages across America; it has never made the big time! Its time is yet to come. No big city has adopted its name or plans as its model. Yet there are two important biblical cities: one is Jerusalem and the other “New Jerusalem”David found Jerusalem on A hill in a village called “Jeru” and Salem is Arabic for Peace.In Jerusalem: The City and Memory; Dr. Richard Ingersoll of Rice University says that gods allegedly founded the city-states in Mesopotamia and had the names of gods as was common throughout the ancient Middle East.

In ancient Egypt the Pharaoh belonged to a Pantheon of gods and the city gathered around his palace in reverence to the cult. The ancient city had functions that we would recognize; markets, circulation, military defense, but they were also cosmological models as well as places to live. I’ve never had the sense of a God centered city in America. Cities in Europe where “domo”; cathedral; etc form the city center and prohibit any structure from being higher are exceptions.

The Scriptural history of Jerusalem (known then as "Salem"), begins when Abraham meets "Melchizedek" (King of Justice) about 2000 BC.Through the ages it has been called by many names: Urusalim, Salem, Mount Moriah, Adonai Urah, Jebus, Jerusalem, Zion, the City of David, Ariel (Lion of God) God has declared that this is the place He will establish His Name and will dwell there forever.

Jerusalem has been fought over by armies of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Ptolemies, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantine, Persians, Arabs, Sleeks, Crusaders, Mongols, Mamelukes, Turks, British, Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Iraqis. Today the nations of the entire world consider it their responsibility and obligation to intervene in her politics and destiny.

Unlike New York, London, Paris and others Jerusalem urbanity is rooted in a struggle between Hagar and Ishmael and Sarah and Jacob and has extended to Muslims, Jews and Christians. Homer recorded the battle between the Greeks and Paris; and New York history settled by Peter Styvestant. The urbanity of the city is woven from its history and contemporary opportunities. Most of the world’s urban centers attract and fuse diverse cultures into a culture at once unique to its specific context yet common to all urban places.

Because "Architecture is the artistic culture of building. As an art, it is concerned with the imitation and translation of the elements of building into symbolic language, expressing in a fixed system of symbols and analogies the origins of architecture in the laws of building.

The condition of architecture to exist as a public art attains to material and above all intellectual permanence. It can be no business of architecture to express ever-changing functions or Zeitgeist. Certain building types become associated with certain functions, rituals and periods, and it are up to sculptural or pictorial iconography to help and sustain these associations."

Léon Krier says: ”The word civilization stands opposed to barbarism, and is derived from civitas--city or state. The Greeks and Romans call all tribes and nations in which authority is vested in the chief, as distinguished from the state, “barbarians”. The French framed a whole period and architectural style after the worst “Goths” to be Gothic.

As a child I urgently sought its presence and being. I longed to suffer the city and the presence of God at His he bequeathed in man His best. I not only came to know, create and build but to love and bear the cities burdens. I knew I was not a barbarian but a citizen and I was searching for my birthrights. However, I was surrounded by people with the mind of an out-law enjoying vulgarity and barbarism. They were immigrants and immigrants siblings but more than that there hear4ts were foreign and decidedly un interested in the welfare of the themselves, family, neighborhood or the state. They were gangsters!

Webster regards its primary sense as foreign, wild, fierce; but this could not have been its original sense; for the Greeks and Romans never termed all foreigners barbarians, and they applied the term to nations that had no inconsiderable culture and refinement of manners, and that had made respectable progress in art and sciences--the Indians, Persians, It was in France that the term “Gothic” was used to affix a people, period and style with a culture of vulgarity and forwardness called the goths. Perhaps this may be true of the “Barbs”as Medians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians.

They applied the term evidently in a political, not an ethical or an aesthetical sense, and as it would seem to designate a social order in which the state was not developed, and in which the nation was personal, not territorial, and authority was held as a private right, not as a public trust, or in which the domain vests in the chief or tribe, and not in the state; for they never term any others barbarians

I grew up amongst midnight cowboys who were Italian, Irish, Polish, Puerto Rican, black, and Jews.

Most likely, being one of the best films ever made, "Midnight Cowboy" is an incredibly original and savagely honest film that takes a look at the big dreams people hold for themselves, and the cold, brutal realities behind them. Voight`s character, Joe Buck, is a young and naive Texas man who flees to New York City, dreaming of becoming a big-shot hustler. Hoffman plays an ailing and sleazy con-man name Ratso Rizzo, who meets Joe along the way.

Jon Voight is cast as Joe Buck, a young man from Texas who comes to New York with the dream of becoming a male prostitute. Dustin Hoffman is Rico Ratzo Rizzo, a crippled street-wise hustler who first cons the young Texan and later befriends him. Together, these two outcasts form a strange bond as they struggle to survive on the streets of New York.

Hoffman's Rizzo is a stirringly accurate portrayal of the kind of urban cretins that lurk in many of the allies and coffee shops along the boulevard of broken dreams that is Manhattan. As I watched Rizzo I thought of my Friends such as Frank Rizzo, Ralph, Johnnie, Hector, Peter Shimco, etc.

Urbanity as the Ziggurat megatool tower of BabelI didn’t realize it as a child, but I grew up with the reification of Ziggurats all around me. Ziggurats are very high buildings. Ancient ziggurats were made by started by making a big flat platform of mud-brick, and then you make a slightly smaller platform on top of the first one, and another on top of that, until the platform is just a little bigger than a temple, and then you build the temple at the very top, rather like a sand-castle. Maybe they thought it was better to pray to the gods from as close as possible, and so if the gods lived up in the sky you had to build great platforms to get near them. The buildings around me were monuments and icons of commerce and industry. Patronage, rentals, and taxes replaced the ritual of praying.

Of course it isn't very hard to build a very impressive building this way: it is solid all the way through, so it is easy to get it to stay up. According to the Book of Genesis in the Bible, after the Flood men again began to get wicked, and they had an awful idea. They wanted to build a tower, which would go all the way up to Heaven, so they could get to Heaven, and are with God. (This may be a memory of the Sumerian Ziggurats, which were built with very much this idea in mind). In the Bible story, God hates this idea, and so he wrecks the tower, and also makes everybody speak different languages, so they will not be able to cooperate on big projects like this anymore.

Genesis: Verse 4:'Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves. 'Ie, let's use our technology to make ourselves look like masters of our environment. And the technology doesn't have to be big in absolute terms. These Babylonian 'ziggurats' (as they are called) weren't that big, any more than the Dome is. It just needs to be big by our standards, big enough that we can stand back and pat ourselves on the back and say, 'Well done us!'

But that takes more than just technology. It takes co-operation - without which things fall apart. And that's the lurking fear at the end of verse 4:'Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.'

And verse 4 captures the spirit of godless humanity perfectly. God excluding, man-exalting. And yet amidst the arrogance, the lurking fear that society and Civilisation could fall apart.

The Sumerians believed that their ancestors had created the ground they lived on by separating it from the water. According to their creation myth, the world was once watery chaos. The mother of Chaos was Tiamat, an immense dragon. When the gods appeared to bring order out of Chaos, Tiamat created an army of dragons. Enlil called the winds to his aid. Tiamat came forward, her mouth wide open. Enlil pushed the winds inside her and she swelled up so that she could not move. Then Enlil split her body open. He laid half of the body flat to form the Earth, with the other half arched over it to form the sky. The gods then beheaded Tiamat's husband and created mankind from his blood, mixed with clay.

Either man wanted to be gods, be favored by gods or have a king, which was favored by God.

1 Samuel 8:10
Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him for a king.

1 Samuel 8:19
But the people refused to listen to Samuel. "No!" they said. "We want a king over us.

1 Samuel 8:21
When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the LORD .

1 Samuel 8:22
The LORD answered, "Listen to them and give them a king." Then Samuel said to the men of Israel, "Everyone go back to his town."

The city which is a “mega-tool” for a society to be powerful, protected, secure, prosperous and victorious was the gods. People dependent on the world and the power of a powerful being. Urbanism is the Babel, Ziggurat and the palace of the king, in which all live and are protected. The Wagner tales are filled with allusions to the earthly adventures of “the gods”.Valhalla, Valkerie, Heaven on Earth.

Each of the most famous cities and city-states of the early Christian church now stands desolate and in ruins.. Urban folks are like the cities in Revelations 2:Each church identified, described and warned. Including Ephesus,Today each stands in ruin. Each was disobedient, and taking matters away form God and turning to other God’s. Even, the 13 original Israel colonies formed by David were split and divided because of the many other gods’ introduced by the many wives of Solomon. Urbanity is inherently diverse and permissive. The most famous was the great statue and relics of Diana. Cities, which rebelled, fell and were destroyed.

They were no longer "right".

,Passion,Urbanity,city address,urban person,Neitczhe,Ayn Rand,urban myth,personas,delegation of authority,Jesus,word,flesh,eternal life,metroplex,Saudi Arabia,Blog Flux Local - Florida,

Vocabulary of Cities by Barie Fez-Barringten; Lecture 4

2008-05-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

The Vocabulary of Cities

By Barie Fez-Barringten

www.BarieFez-Barringten.com

New Jerusalem is another city as described in the book of Revelations Chapter 21: verses 10-27 describes great city, the holy Jerusalem, The dimensions of this city are 1,500 miles square” followed by descriptions of the architectural finishes , sizes and functions and it is this very city in which Christians know they will eternally reside.

Atlantis

Alford’s theory explains all of the bizarre elements in the Atlantis story: the supernatural creation of the island; its abundance of the unknown metal oreichalkos; the fact of its enclosure by the ‘opposite continent’; the strange disappearance of the Athenian heroes at the time of the war against Atlantis; the alleged discrepancy concerning the date of the war; and the transformation of the sunken island into a sea of mud, Alan Alford argues that in order to understand the story of Atlantis, it is vital to get inside the mind of its author, Plato.

Below, in extracts from his book ‘The Atlantis Secret’, he provides a biography of Plato, explains his most fundamental ideas and hints at a spiritual secret which Plato may have encoded in his writings.
Thus, in Alford’s view, Plato would have begun his writing career with the linked pair of books Timaeus and Critias in which he told the story of Athens and Atlantis in order to illustrate Socrates’ ideal state in action.
The Theory of Forms is also fundamental to the book Timaeus in which the Atlantis story is told.
True philosophers were thus regarded as a series of messiah-like figures who would deliver an ideal era of peace and prosperity on Earth, but all the time preparing their own personal souls for an ultimate elevation to Heaven.

The story is about the conflict between the ancient Athenians and the Atlantians 9000 years before Plato's time, Egyptian priests conveyed knowledge of the distant past apparently forgotten to the Athenians of Plato’s day, the story of Atlantis to Solon.

Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia.

But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.

Various intellects define a City

Mumford had many interesting definitions for the city, including calling it a "symphony”, in The Culture of Cities (1937) he said it was "The point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community...the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning."

Giedion Sjoberg defines it without any reference to form as "a community of substantial size and population density that shelters a variety of non- agricultural specialists, including literate elite”. Arnold Toynbee thinks of it in more functionalist terms "a cluster of buildings with a dense population unable to raise its own food but able to supply goods and services to those in the country in exchange for food."

Max Weber, one of the founders of modern sociology, distinguished Western cities from eastern (I believe erroneously) by explaining they had a fortification, a market, an independent court of justice, a related administrative hierarchy, and some form of political autonomy. One important point that you will read about in Kostof's definition of the city is that it is never alone, but part of a series of cities in which it fits according to hierarchical order.

Almost every serious definition of the city arrives at a point when it must be considered as both a social and a physical phenomenon. The ancient Roman terms for it gives us the two intersecting categories of Urbs and Civitas: the first referring to morphology, the second to the social institutions.

Kevin Lynch explains: "City forms, they’re actual function, and the ideas and values that people attach to them make up a single phenomenon”.

Lynch says that the other important ancient term, polis, although it derived from the word for fortress came to signify the administrative coherence of a city with its dependent countryside, better known as the city-state.

The city: "a product of time...the molds in which men's lifetimes have cooled and congealed giving lasting shape, by way of art, to moments that would otherwise vanish with the living and leave no means of renewal or wider participation behind them”. Thus, the many cities I have visited in my “travels’ where the cities wall and remains of the original fortress still remains.

Lynch says”: The urban process is based on socialization, the way that people organize themselves and the institutions they invent to manage the distribution of surplus.

But almost as uncontrollable as geography is the historic wave, the flux of events, such as wars, plagues, earthquakes, religious conversions, and such that are usually beyond the control of a city.

As a form, the city adapts to the dictates of its site but is shaped consciously by knowledge of spatial precedents in a system of solids and voids.

And the solids of this system are made according to local and sometimes external precedents of typologies, architectural elements, and materials, a lexicon of built knowledge.

Cities do not stay the same and even the bible gives cites great importance . Revelations, chapter 18 prophecies about the fall of Bagdad and prophesizes about the fallen cities of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea for being luke warm, dead, unfaithful, idolaters, sinful and deceitful. Most of these cities are today in ruin. All over the world there are cities which have become obsolete when cities by rivers were superseded by motor vehicles and trains and people relocated to port and transportation nodes. In other places, the Bible speaks about the fall of Jerusalem and many of the cities in Israel. In our own lifetime we have seen neighborhoods, communities and whole cities in the United States of America, Europe and Asia be destroyed, abandoned and rebuilt. The city of Le Harve in France is such a good example.

Frank Lloyd Wright and Thomas Jefferson

Frank Lloyd Wright said that the citizen of the future will chose horizontal space, donated to him by the car, the telephone and the telegraph and that human life will be able to be sunken in the earth again..."

In the thirties, Wright developed and promoted a utopian scheme, which was fundamental to all the work, which would follow.

He called it Broadacre City, a name that evoked exactly what it was -- a plan for a decentralized yet urban America.

Wright described it first in 1932 in The Disappearing City, revised and expanded it in when Democracy builds in 1945, and again revised and expanded it in The Living City in 1958. Broadacre City stands as Wright's answer to urbanization.

Frank Lloyd Wright's city, he has said, would be "everywhere and nowhere.

“He developed a master plan for ideal communities located away from large cities, viewed by Wright as unfit for human habitation. In creating Broadacre City, Wright combined social ideas and values with contemporary concerns about technology -- the automobile, communications, electric power, and developing systems in construction, manufacturing, and transportation.

His plan employed a democracy and an aesthetic grounded in a reverence for nature around which to center a way of life, as contrasted with the technical imperatives of contemporary engineers and technocrats, or the moral imperatives of the social planners. In the winter of 1934-35, his apprentices built a model of Wright's famous urban planning scheme, Broadacre City.

Usonian homes consisted of single family houses on a 1-acre lots to begin small, leave room for expansion, suggests prefabricated units, modular system can grow, suggests quadruple plans, an acre can be divided into 1/4 acre lots, individual emphasis apparent in designs for vertical body car and air- born vehicles, re-establish deep, personal relation to nature (for each individual), aesthetic controls (let nature be apparent) ,no poles or wires (all utilities underground)
- no headlights or light fixtures, no glaring cement roads or walks agriculture integral to community (farms, farmers, farmers’ markets) roadside markets, not just for commerce, but as vital, community meeting places parks, agriculture and gardens form basic matrix of community; Broadacre City would never have succeeded (never intended to be realized) yet today cities have adapted these same standards as planning and zoning guidelines.

According to one assessment (by Norris Kelly Smith) its realization "would require:

· The abrogation of the Constitution of the United States,

· The elimination of thousands of government bodies from the make-up of the state,

· The confiscation of all lands by right of eminent domain but without compensation,

· The demolition of all cities and therewith the obliteration of every evidence of the country’s history,

The rehousing of the entire population, the retraining of millions of persons so as to enable them to be self-sustaining farmers, and other difficulties too numerous to mention.

As a practicable program it does not even deserve discussion."
but, for Wright, Broadacre City represented a new direction in architecture It was a metaphor for the connection between humankind and nature
Wright’s task, as architect: to bring humans into harmony with nature
an expression (progression) of his philosophy: "Eventually we must live for the Beautiful, whether we want to or not."
Broadacre City represented, for Wright, what he believed was the basic human covenant with nature (beauty) the highest official in Broadacre City was to be the County Architect, popularly elected, but with supreme powers to regulate the appearance of the community, down to the details of private dwellings

Much of the evil of urban life summed up in the term: rent
Broadacre city has land reform: in ideal community each family would be entitled to own homestead (or aspire to)
aimed to create nation of independent homeowners

Wright’s ideal was the cousin of Jefferson’s agrarianism.

Wright demonstrated that modern man could conjure a new city without it being a sub-urb a planned and well-conceived city with its unique and sovereign infrastructure. It was an idea already brewing with the military and some government relief to nations programs. It picked up steam in the fifties and spawned industrial new cities in China, Bazil, Russia, etc. It took a form in places called new towns such as Reston and Columbia in Virginia and Maryland.

Jefferson on Agrarianism

Jefferson's views were molded by the peculiar lifestyle of the Virginia aristocracy with its unique brand of relaxed Anglicanism, broad tolerance of heterodoxy and the natural, nepotistic interface between the landed families and local politics. Agrarianism was a movement for the equal division of landed property and for the promotion of agricultural interests.

Steeped in pastoralism, Jefferson was at first (in the 1770s and 1780s) averse even to considering agrarianism the policy for his country. Where pastoralism the practice of herding as the primary economic activity of a society.

He argued that manufacturers, and the resultant urban squalor, should remain out of the country and he insisted on shipping agricultural produce to Europe for processing, irrespective of expense. The industrialist was Jefferson's bogeyman. Yet, although he abhorred industrialism, he looked on the machine and its uses in a different light: "From Jefferson's perspective, the machine is a token of that liberation of the human spirit to be realized by the young American Republic; the factory system, on the other hand, is but feudal oppression in a slightly modified form. Once the machine is removed from the dark, crowded, grimy cities of Europe, he assumes that it will blend harmoniously into the open countryside of his native land.

He envisages it turning mill wheels, moving ships up rivers, and, all in all, helping transform a wilderness into a society of the middle landscape" (Marx 150).

Frank Lloyd advocated against cites and urged all to move to the prairies claiming that cities were un-American and unhealthy. Corbusier and others, advocated consolidating resource and moving into cites. People like Chermayeff taught us a vocabulary for bringing a design vocabulary to urbanity addressing many of it ills, mainly articulating community from privacy and hierarchies of issues and increasing public and private spaces and systems.

Jefferson, Wright and Cobra were trying to interfere with the metaphors and expectations of a world expanding in population, food production, energy and information.

Not a world controlled by policy of its betterment because of an ideal or prophesy but by the inevitable diversity built into babbling and tending the earth and readying for the second coming of the Lord.

I learned what make cities and my place in them for which I am most grateful. I also learned that there are exceptions and where there is agreement and one-accord cities can be created and shaped. That agreement can come from multinational and banking fiancée; national consolidation of resources and tyrannical dictatorship bent on creating a legacy.

The familiar conception, the Galbraithean way- based on the concept of market 
economies- states that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, 
although they can be improved.

Thus, the gap between means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity, at least to
the point that "urgent goods" become plentiful. But there is also a Zen road to affluence,
which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on
the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material
plenty - with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters.

And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behavior: their "prodigality"
for example- the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made.
Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters' economic propensities may be more
consistently predicated on abundance than our own.

Destutt de Tracy, "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire" though he might have been, at least forced
Marx to agree, "in poor nations the people are comfortable", whereas in rich nations,
"they are generally poor".

Most members of society have achieved a society in which scarcity of resources is not the
predominant condition and a general level of economic well being.
The term was made current by John Kenneth Galbraith in the Affluent Society,
which described conditions in the United States after World War II.

In Puerto Rico where I was junior vice president of the Island’s largest architectural firm ,
Our offices driver and general gofer, Pabon once invited my wife and I to visit his home on the
outskirts of San Juan. Over the years he had built the house himself out of concrete blocks
and was the richest man in his village with a TV, and a electricity.
His house was embedded in a grove of bananas and tropical flowers, fruits and greens.
His wife made a sumptuous meal and they pointed out the happiness of there life and
their environment. Since then we have seen many such families in India, Philippines  and
South Africa, of course the early days of own family in New York City’s tenements is also a good
example of the way the so-called  poor can be very comfortable in cites.

The term "Affluent society" came form an account of American society that emphasizes
the apparent wealth and material fascination and wellbeing of a large segment of the
population, namely the middle-classes and above. What this conception often overlooks is
that this affluence is possible only to the extent that the American working-class remains
essentially in its  nineteenth century position and the extent to which some others remain
"un-affluent”.

Karl Marx was so profoundly wrong about so many issues and the Left has clung to his mistakes 
so tenaciously that it is hard to decide which of his errors has had the most deleterious affect on 
human affairs. But I think it is safe to say that one of the worst ideas that he advocated, and 
which was swallowed whole hog by liberals, was the idea that materialism is the supreme and 
determinative motivation for human action. Thus, he proposed, all of human existence boils 
down to the yearning to live at a subsistence level, to be clothed, fed and housed. Now I'm not 
saying that these things aren't powerful motivators, I'd merely suggest that it is a failure of 
perspective to suggest that they are the be all and end all of life. Sure when you are hungry 
feeding yourself seems like the purpose of life, but to a drowning man there's no higher purpose 
than treading water. Draw back from either of these immediate situations and you see that the 
sufferer has too narrow a perspective.

However, Galbraith, who was apparently little more than a garden variety liberal with some height,
some panache and a facility with the language, wrote this entire book as a protest against the
growth economy, as if it is some kind of iron clad law that once men's most basic material
desires are met, they are fed, clothed and housed, then their fundamental purposes in life have
been fulfilled. He therefore assumes that any material consumption beyond this base level is
unnatural and is created somehow by forces extrinsic to the individual and this consumption is a
historical aberration that is being fostered by erroneous attitudes and insidious advertising.
Moreover, since these mistaken or malicious factors can not prevail for long, eventually people
will realize that they are consuming beyond their needs and they will stop.
Therefore, since man, in his view, does not need more than the minimal requirements of existence
and since modern society produces enough to satisfy these basic needs for every citizen,
it is foolish to keep our focus on expanding the economy. Instead, we should concentrate on
redistributing what we have, yadda-yadda-yadda.

It is impossible to convey a sense of how incredibly misguided Galbraith's theories and his policy
prescriptions have proven. Here are just a few inanities to ponder.
He is totally dismissive of the idea that recipients of welfare benefits will be damaged by those
very payments, scoffing at the notion that they will become dependents of the state.
He concludes that, having reached the point where our needs are taken care of,
modern man will necessarily do one of three things: work fewer ours and days;
or work less hard; or fewer people will choose to work. He states with great confidence that
operating the economy at capacity is per se inflationary, so he suggests that we build in a
higher level of unemployment. He prattles on about the current imbalance between public and
private production, averring that public "goods" are being neglected in favor of production of
private goods. But what are these public goods and how about medicine, education, etc.?
He is so obtuse, or so trapped in a Social Welfare State mindset, that he can't even see that
these too are fundamentally private goods. But perhaps the most incredible aspect of the
book is his treatment of the American economy as a closed system; he never mentions our
trading partners or the developing world and how they will impact the "Affluent Society". Conventional economic theory is based on the assumption that resources are scarce.

Therefore, it makes increasing production in the private sector and limiting interference and
regulation from the government a priority. In Galbraith’s affluent society, this priority is misplaced
because scarcity is not predominant.

The continued pursuit of conventional economic objectives in an affluent society leads to the
conditions Galbraith observed in postwar America: private-sector affluence and public-sector
squalor.

For example, affluence in the private sector led to the mass availability of automobiles.
Because public-sector interference (in the form of regulation and taxation) was discouraged,
however, governments could not afford to build adequate roadways to accommodate those
automobiles.

This was all remedied by massive highways programs, energy exploration and production and
massive employment in the production of transpiration, communications, energy and later
information technologies. All of which required massive deployment of capital and human
resources. I became one of those resources.

 The Affluent Society and Urbanism

The Affluent Society was a term to describe the United States after World War II. An Affluent
Society is rich in private resources but poor in public ones because of a misplaced priority
on increasing production in the private sector. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the U.S.
should shift resources to improve schools, the infrastructure, recreational resources, and
social services providing a better standard of life instead of more and more consumer goods.
The term is now used to indicate prosperity, wide spread

Scarcity may not appropriate for today’s age of mass affluence.
Those with vested interests in production (i.e. large businesses) still cling to the
"conventional wisdom" that increased production equals progress, even though goods are now
abundant and our basic material needs have been satisfied. To stimulate further demand,
corporations must resort to salesmanship and advertising. If advertising stopped,
demand would fall, production would drop, and unemployment would rise; thus, business continue
to focus on increasing production to ensure their survival.

Next, Galbraith shifts his view from private industry to the public sector.
He does this by introducing the idea of social balance, which asserts that as private
spending increases, public spending should increase to match.
For example, if factories build more cars, more money needs to be invested in public roads.
Unfortunately, companies that can react quickly to changes in demand sell private goods
via advertising. In contrast, public investment by governments reacts much more slowly,
and typically lags private spending and investment, due to regulations, bureaucracy,
and voter’s general aversion to new taxes. The result is a world rich in private goods
but poor in public ones: beautiful cars driving on poor roads, well-dressed kids in the
crumbling public school, neighborhoods with beautiful homes but polluted parks.

So what to do?

Galbraith’s proposed solution is that we should invest in our economic infrastructure
such as parks, roads, educational system, long-term scientific research, police,
and the like, to fund this, he emphasizes sales taxes, which reduce consumption,
and make those who consume a lot pay for it.
I can tell you that Saudi Arabia has taken Galbraith’s proposal literally and
continues to pour money into transforming the desert into a collection of well
appointed cities. However, aside from life in the souks and Madrassas their cities
are void of the kind of life we would find in other Arab and European cities.
No mater what the structures and infrastructure with out a dynamic cosmopolitan
urban culture the city will be without life. In future lectures we shall look into what
makes this kind of life.

,Affluent society,Atlantis,Chermayeff,Cities,Civitas,Corbusier,Culture,Galbraith,Galbraithean,Gideon,Kevin Lynch,Mumford,New Jerusalem,the affluentsociety,Urbs,Weber,Zen,Blog Flux Local - Florida,