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The time has come to kill architectural modernism. While the ideas that underlay the movement produced some fine buildings (though admittedly none that come to mind) the dictum of Adolf Loos in his essay “Ornament and Crime” that avoidance of ornament was “a sign of spiritual strength” could not be more wrong. Loos likely was…
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Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, has a wonderful Q & A in the New York Times in which he claims that “sidewalks are the basis of democracy.” He hardly needs to say more—he is the angel of urbanism. There is no clearer statement of urban values than the idea that walkable, high-density core…
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I want to submit that the solution to all modern life is found in that oldest of city structures–the piazza. Though we tend to think of the piazza as purely Italian, in fact the French “Place” and the English square have much the same virtue. All are public gathering places.
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Poetry Review Two Or Three Guitars: Selected Poems by John Terpstra Two or Three Guitars is John Terpstra’s seventh book of poems. The Governor-General nominated writer has moved far along enough in his career for this latest book to be a “selected poems” that lets his readers look back on a twenty-five year career that…
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Poetry Review Primer on the Hereafter by Steve McOrmond Steve McOrmond opens his second collection Primer on the Hereafter with an epigraph from John Ashbery’s poem “Posture of Unease.” Ashbery says: “For all you I/Have neglected, ignored,/Left to stew in your own juices,/Not been like a friend that is approaching,/I ask forgiveness, a song like…
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Frank Gehry, the Canadian-born American architect, who’s now become a household name in sophisticated circles, has a great piece in The Atlantic about architecture and cities. Gehry points out that though most Americans (and Canadians) live in sterile box-like houses in the suburbs or glass curtain-wall towers in downtown cities, they nonetheless make pilgrimages to…
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Film Review The Lives of Others The recent film “The Lives of Others” is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long, long, time. So often my experience with films that have “buzz” is that all the praise being heaped upon the film is so much flim-flam. I remember a number of years…
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Will Alsop, a British architect, is the crazy mind behind the Sharp Centre for Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design. When I first moved to Toronto, it was one of the few buildings I saw that provoked any excitement, that provided any kind of challenge to Toronto’s bland architectural sensibilities. Now Paul…
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Traffic islands are a great thing. They not only allow pedestrians to halve their crossing time, but they beautify the ugliness of streets, and most importantly, they take space away from cars! In Toronto, where I live now, there are no traffic islands except on University avenue. There they are wonderful except that the avenue…
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One recent development in urbanism is the idea of “naked streets”. This is not, as one might wish it to be, a haven for urban nudists, but the idea that when all forms of separation between the street and the sidewalk is removed–when the first priority does NOT go to the car–streets are safer. The…
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Toronto architecture is a disaster. The city, particularly in commercial areas is built without any sense of context or politeness. So you end up with a fifty-story glass tower with a parking lot on one side and run-down thrift-shop on the other. Though exciting in its human geography,Toronto’s physical geography is a deadly combination of…
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Cars• melt the planet by being the key driver of global warming!• bring war, corruption, and impoverishment on an global scale (because of oil)• kill people directly (48,000 per year in the US alone)• promote social isolation• hide the true cost of suburban life• make people fat, encouraging a stigma against them, and contributing to…
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Find below some examples of why people choose the suburbs over the city. What can be done to change this? What would it take to provoke SUBURBIA DISGUST? How can we convince people of the evils of suburbia–the need for a car, the lifetime spent driving, the cookie-cutter houses, the malls. SUBURBANITES RESPOND: Why do…
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Here is my subjective list of the Best Cities in the World… New York Paris Vienna Boston Toronto London Tokyo Barcelona San Francisco Los Angeles
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Poetry Review The Human Cannonball by Halli Villegas At its best the despair of others reminds us of the persistence of happiness. When we watch or hear of suffering we may be lucky enough to recognize that for most of us life isn’t so bad. If it’s successful, the sadness artists express soothes our nerves…
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Idea Review The Need for Moral Relativism Lorenzo Albacete, a Roman Catholic priest writing in The New York Times, has put forth a fascinating if flawed defense of Pope Benedict XVIth’s encyclical “God is Love”. His commentary correctly states that the resistance of many non-believers to religion centers around the idea of the intolerance of…
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As several papers have indicated in their editorials, blasphemy in their view is not a crime.Indeed, one could argue that blasphemy is a responsibilty for any democratic society…. Whether their ultimate aim is to preserve democracy or not is impossible to guess, but there is little doubt that no country can claim to be free…
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Analytic philosophers, in their presumption, assume either that such statements have no philosophical importance, or that they in fact are or contain analytic satements and thus can be dealt with rationally.Groundwork for a Poetic MetaphysicsEmotive statements are important, however, because emotions clearly affect how we percieve and interact with the world…. And though the dictionary…
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But great poets often produce mediocre work, bad poets can be surprisingly good, and very good poets are frequently no better than consistently above average – all of which is to say that it’s far more difficult to isolate “great poetry” than Kleinzahler (and most critics) might like to believe.
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Idea Review David Horowitz and The Academic Bill of Rights David Horowitz, who’s become infamous in academic circles for his so-called “Academic Bill of Rights” repeats more nonsense in a recent piece in The LA Times. I have several responses to “Ideologues at the Lectern.” The first part of my response, as I’ve stated before,…
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Charles Durning Carroll 