meanwhile, i've been reading louis kahn . . .
"In the center of a very large city, maybe i cannot use Amsterdam as an example as it is a city of a different nature, but certainly in Paris, Rome, New York, in Philadelphia or any other large city, the street in the middle of the town wants to be a building; it does not want to be just a street. If you think of it only as a street, then it never can occur to you that the construction of it is anything but a leftover thing in which you use the meanest ways of making it, because you will not see it.
But if you think of it as being that which it really wants to be -- and that is a building -- you will not have to dig it up every time a pipe goes bad. you will have a place for these things. you will have a place for walking under, you will have a place for other things, and it will occur to you what this building is which is called a street, and you will realize that you are actually walking on or riding on the roof of this building."
Louis Kahn, _Essential Texts_, NY: Norton, 2003, p. 39. Italics added.
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From March 15 New Yorker ("The Terrazzo Jungle"):
Mr. G. lowered his brows and glared at us. “You are troubled by all those tunnels, are you not?” he inquired. “You wonder whether there is room for them in the present underground jungle of pipes and wires. Did you never think how absurd it is to bury beneath tons of solid pavement equipment that is bound to go on the blink from time to time?” He leaped from his chair and thrust an imaginary pneumatic drill against his polished study floor. “Rat-a-tat-tat!” he exclaimed. “Night and day! Tear up the streets! Then pave them! Then tear ’em up again!” Flinging aside the imaginary drill, he threw himself back in his chair. “In my New York of the future, all pipes and wires will be strung along the upper sides of those tunnels, above a catwalk, accessible to engineers and painted brilliant colors to delight rather than appall the eye.”
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