You Can Take It With You

“The American dream was Every man gets his castle ,” Todd Gannon, the head of architecture at Ohio State University's Knowlton School, told me. Above all else, the suburban life is one of independence, a self-contained homestead where the American family can realize its desire and potential, unperturbed by others. Even the family car gets its own b... See more

One of the basic problems with Non-Place is that it’s contagious. When you start introducing Non-Places into a city design, you tend to add more and more Non-Places to try to fix the problems caused by the original Non-Places. If you have two Places next to each other, like an apartment building and a store, then you can easily walk from the apartm... See more

Again, I want to be very clear that these neighborhoods are not some hell on earth, and anyone from the rest of world would be smitten to have the chance to live in them. As I wrote above, if an average African, Asian, or Latin American asked my advice I would tell them to move there. It would be downright weird of me to tell them otherwise, given ... See more