We Only Do Awesome

I was halfway through The Timeless Way of Building before I realized I was holding in my hands the most influential book on design that I would ever read. I deserved much of the blame – my head was firmly up my ass – but the book starts off sounding like a self-help book guaranteed to scare off the very people Christopher Alexander wants to persuade.

Jane Jacobs’s approach may be no less effective on the unconverted, but I no longer need to be convinced. The Death and Life of American Cities gets right to the point in the introduction. At least three people that whose opinions I respect have told me that they’ve been reading wanting to start reading, or thinking that I should be reading this book. Note to all of you: I am now reading it. Thank you!

I also picked up the Suburbanization of New York, a collection of essays that I found at the recently-moved AIA Bookstore on Arch Street in Philadelphia. I bought it because I had ridden to the bookstore last Friday morning and got knocked off my bike as I approached the shop, and I couldn’t find a copy of Jacobs’s book. I wanted to leave with something; when I have a brush with death, I want it to be for some purpose.

On the subject of American cities and New York and urban decay, I want to recommend a novel I recently read: Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. It was the subject of a recent essay in City Journal that discussed the novel in the context of the apparently-common belief in the permanence of New York’s “second golden age.”