I just finished Albert Pope's Ladders for the second time, one of the best (and most underrated) books on architecture and urbanism I've ever read. Ladders is required reading for anyone who senses that the changes cities have undergone in the past fifty years are still poorly understood by the urban theorists tasked with explaining them to us. Pope's argument, in short, is that traditional urban fabric, characterized by the grid, is a type of built environment we stopped producing decades ago, and everything we actually do build, from malls to office parks to freeways, constitute an alternative form of urbanism that remains outside of any framework we have for understanding and dealing with cities. We essentially ignore it.
#21: Ladders & the Closed Internet
#21: Ladders & the Closed Internet
#21: Ladders & the Closed Internet
I just finished Albert Pope's Ladders for the second time, one of the best (and most underrated) books on architecture and urbanism I've ever read. Ladders is required reading for anyone who senses that the changes cities have undergone in the past fifty years are still poorly understood by the urban theorists tasked with explaining them to us. Pope's argument, in short, is that traditional urban fabric, characterized by the grid, is a type of built environment we stopped producing decades ago, and everything we actually do build, from malls to office parks to freeways, constitute an alternative form of urbanism that remains outside of any framework we have for understanding and dealing with cities. We essentially ignore it.