Raise the Hammer

"The desires and gut reactions of the community are the very essence of a great, living city, as opposed to a banal and dysfunctional one." ~ The Architect Has No Clothes

High density does not imply tall buildings. Some of the highest densities in the world have been achieved in low to mid-rise communities.

The need for tall towers is driven by greed on part of the developer which is rationalized by faulty economic calculations, and articulated by journalists, planners and architects with poor education.

The ideas that percolate via populist media from this motley mix of ignorance, is what you are regurgitating here once again.

The professions of architecture and urban design have been in a collapsed state for some time now.

The language you use is that of a commercial Realtor, who patches and repackages old ideas and buzz words from these collapsed professions in order to sell real-estate. It has nothing to do with peoples needs, urban design and how cities can be rebuilt in our times.

For you to recognize that what you write about is nothing more than real-estate sales brochure chatter, you need to get familiar with what is happening at the leading edge of architecture and urban design today: Complex Adaptive Systems, The Transformation of Wholes, The Meaning of Complexity, Intelligence and the Information Environment, Computational Irreducibility, The Network City, Biophilia, Evidence-based Design, Self-Organization... and more.

You won't find this in our local newspapers, or local architecture and real-estate development magazines which feature God like images of developers in front of iconic towers. Instead, look it up here: Science for designers and Frontiers of Design Science.

These are a wonderful set of short essays which if you are able to humbly absorb, may open up a whole new world for you, and possibly a better way of conversing here on architecture and urban development.

Mahesh P. Butani