"We are fond of observing that our urban world is a complex one, that it changes with a rapidity..."

“We are fond of observing that our urban world is a complex one, that it changes with a rapidity beyond real comprehension, and finally, that it is a disjointed world.At certain moments in our urbane lives we relish all the diversity and disjointedness of cities, and bask in the variety of them. Certainly cities have been the locus of man’s most creative moments in history, because of the varied experience they afford us.But when a plethora of stimuli begins to divert us from receptive consciousness, the city renders us insensible. Then, in our inability to order experience, we suffer the city, and long for some adequate means to comprehend it as a product of men like ourselves—as the product of an intelligent, ordering force. If the scientist is frustrated when the order or pattern of phenomena is too fleeting for him to observe, or too complex to recognize with extant tools, so is the city dweller frustrated when he cannot find human order in his environment. At those moments when he sees only the results of mechanical and economic processes controlling the form and feel of his place, he must feel estranged, and outside.If urban design is to fulfill its role, to make a contribution to the form of the city, it must do more than simply organize mechanical forces, and make physical unity from diversity. It must recognise the meaning of the order it seeks to manufacture, a humanely significant, spatial order.”

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Fumihiko Maki 

(h/t inthenoosphere)

from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/149459828932