The Stronger The Identity, The More It

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

I Think One Of The Important Evolutions Is That We No Longer Feel Compulsively The Need To Argue, Or To Justify Things On A Kind Of Rational Level. We Are Much More Willing To Admit That Certain Things Are Completely Instinctive And Others Are Really Intellectual.

All Important Architecture Of The Last Century Was Strongly Influenced By Political Systems. Look At The Soviet System, With Its Constructivism And Stalinism, Weimer With Its Modern Style, Mussolini And, Of Course, The Nazis And Albert Speer's Colossal Structures. Today's Architecture Is Subservient To The Market And Its Terms. The Market Has Supplanted Ideology. Architecture Has Turned Into A Spectacle. It Has To Package Itself And No Longer Has Significance As Anything But A Landmark.

People Can Inhabit Anything. And They Can Be Miserable In Anything And Ecstatic In Anything. More And More I Think That Architecture Has Nothing To Do With It. Of Course, That's Both Liberating And Alarming.

Manhattan Is An Accumulation Of Possible Disasters That Never Happen.