The City Is An Addictive Machine From

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.

The Metropolis Strives To Reach A Mythical Point Where The World Is Completely Fabricated By Man, So That It Absolutely Coincides With His Desires.

Find Optimism In The Inevitable.

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.

What Is Now Called "green Architecture" Is An Opportunistic Caricature Of A Much Deeper Consideration Of The Issues Related To Sustainability That Architecture Has Been Engaged With For Many Years. It Was One Of The First Professions That Was Deeply Concerned With These Issues And That Had An Intellectual Response To Them.