The architect Robert Venturi, discussing public space, once suggested that "the open piazza is seldom appropriate for an American city today except as a convenience for pedestrians for diagonal short-cuts," explaining that "Americans feel uncomfortable sitting in a square: they should be working at the office or home with the family looking at television." That pessimistic observation, published in 1966, was a useful polemic against a modernist orthodoxy that Venturi helped to upend, but it obviously hasn't aged well, nor was it quite true even then.