"Norman Brosterman discusses the history of kindergarten and its influence on such modernist giants as Frank Lloyd Wright, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus school.
In his book Inventing Kindergarten, Brosterman argues that within this lost world of women and children we can locate the seedbed of modern art. With its emphasis on abstract decomposition and building up from elemental forms, the original kindergarten system of the mid-nineteenth century created an education and design revolution that profoundly affected the course of modern art and architecture, as well as physics, music, psychology and the modern mind itself."

"Penn South is a cooperative in affluent, 21st-century Manhattan past which chic crowds hustle every day to and from nearby Chelsea’s art galleries, apparently oblivious to it. It thrives within a dense, diverse neighborhood of the sort that makes NY special. Pruitt-Igoe, segregated de facto, isolated & impoverished, collapsed along w/ the industrial city around it.

But they’re both classic examples of modern architecture, the kind Mr. Jencks, among countless others, left for dead: superblocks of brick & concrete high rises scattered across grassy plots, so-called towers in the park, descended from Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City.” The words “housing project” instantly conjure them up.

Alienating, penitential breeding grounds for vandalism & violence: that became the tower in the park’s epitaph. But Penn South, with its stolid redbrick, concrete-slab housing stock, is clearly a safe, successful place. In this case the architecture works. In St. Louis, where the architectural scheme…"

"A realised utopia is definitive and concluded. It cannot evolve, for that would imply an error or instability in the originally conceived utopia. This is what seems to underlie the brutality that Michel Houellebecq ascribes to Le Corbusier's vision in his latest novel: utopia's inherent lack of evolutionary scope (for nature, man and architecture itself), and the exclusion of continuity from its language. The same flaw is also shared by 3D projects for the most recent signature buildings, thus disclosing their utopian aspiration: whiter than white, rendered surfaces; empty and immaculate horizons all around, never to be populated; proportionate, identical trees set in rows; scattered knots of people inside them gazing into each other's eyes or holding hands, with children destined never to grow, who have no shadow. This non-utopia represents the epicentre of Dionisio González's work."

"The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure…

• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

Central to Scott’s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or “sedentarize” nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives…"

"somehow rings familiar. During early 20th century, art & architecture never existed wholly isolated from popular culture, consumerism, or corporate interests. This was the case in Europe as it was in US. As Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin or various Reynolds Aluminum ads that would appear in US in 1940s demonstrate, corporate interests sometimes found an unlikely alliance w/ avant-garde. But with Bel Geddes & “The City of Tomorrow,” something slightly different was in order. The author of Horizons did see himself primarily as artist, but never in the same vein as would Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, or Erich Mendelsohn. As a person who always wore his commercial aspirations on his sleeve, Bel Geddes became a figure willing to leverage artistic inclinations not only as a kind of expertise, but as vehicle for transmitting ideas about contemporary urbanism to mass audiences. He was…person who popularized utopia by giving it its most tangible & visibly-appealing manifestation…"

"Cheerful software, above all, honors the truth about humanity:

Humans are not rational beings.

A human is a walking sack of squishy meat and liquids, awash in chemicals.

We laugh. We cry. Sometimes we laugh while crying. We love, and hate, and dream about tomorrow while paying no attention to today. We do ridiculous things in pursuit of love or happiness or self-esteem. We sabotage ourselves. We see faces in inanimate objects, clouds, rock formations, and unevenly toasted bread. Then we sell them on eBay.

We pray to giant humans up in the sky. We think that a fly could be our grandmother. We work for free because we’re bored. We create art, dance, and sing even if we are starving. We give to others when we have little, or we give none when we have a lot, even if we gain no clear survival benefit either way."

"a thoughtful argument against the excesses of "designer" architects and urban-planning utopians." "Pei's pyramid at the Louvre...was a deliberate act of cultural vandalism"