Why glass towers are bad for city life -- and what we need instead | Justin Davidson
There's a creepy transformation taking over our cities, says architecture critic Justin Davidson. From Houston, Texas to Guangzhou, China, shiny towers of ...
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Imagine that when you walked in here this evening, you discovered that everybody in the room looked almost exactly the same: ageless, raceless, generically good-looking. That person sitting right next to you might have the most idiosyncratic inner life, but you don't have a clue because we're all wearing the same blank expression all the time. That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities, only it applies to buildings, not people. Cities are full of roughness and shadow, texture and color. You can still find architectural surfaces of great individuality and character in apartment buildings in Riga and Yemen, social housing in Vienna, Hopi villages in Arizona, brownstones in New York, wooden houses in San Francisco. These aren't palaces or cathedra...
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Imagine that when you walked in here this evening, you discovered that everybody in the room looked almost exactly the same: ageless, raceless, generically good-looking. That person sitting right next to you might have the most idiosyncratic inner life, but you don't have a clue because we're all wearing the same blank expression all the time. That is the kind of creepy transformation that is taking over cities, only it applies to buildings, not people. Cities are full of roughness and shadow, texture and color. You can still find architectural surfaces of great individuality and character in apartment buildings in Riga and Yemen, social housing in Vienna, Hopi villages in Arizona, brownstones in New York, wooden houses in San Francisco. These aren't palaces or cathedra...
