THE CIVIC ART: CLEVELAND: SOME CORE PRINCIPLES

Monday, February 13, 2012

SOME CORE PRINCIPLES

Epworth-Euclid Church
Bertram Goodhue with Walker & Weeks, c. 1928

§ Every place in the world is unique culturally, historically, and climatically. Its architecture and urbanism should support, protect, and reflect these qualities.

§ Our cities should be environmentally sustainable.

§ A neighborhood should have vitality, stability, and should encourage a sense of community.

§ Neighborhoods should be diverse in all aspects, including age, race, and economic level.

§ The structure of a city should help foster the realization of social and economic justice in a society.

§ The structure of a city should encourage the maintenance of physical health by its inhabitants.

§The form of a city should foster independence for all, including children, the disabled, the aged, and those of less means.

§ Public institutions, such as schools, churches, and libraries, are centers of neighborhood life.

§ Streets and public spaces within the urban fabric are the physical manifestation of the spirit of the community.

(Thank you to Professor Oscar Machado of the University of Miami for requiring that his students articulate their ideals in writing.)

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QUOTABLE

“To vitalize building materials, to animate them with a thought...to charge them with a social significance and value...to impart to them the best that is in the people–such is the real function of the architect.”

—Louis Henri Sullivan

“One of the primary obligations of any work of architecture is to create a sense of place, to respect and enhance a building’s physical and cultural context.”

“Another responsibility is to work within a tradition in a scholarly manner, to be succored but not smothered by the values of architectural culture.”

—Robert A. M. Stern

“The best way to make real architecture is by letting a building evolve out of a place and culture.”

—Samuel Mockbee of Rural Studio

“There is not an important city anywhere in America that does not have a unique character, a particular spirit, and a fascinating history.”

—Kenneth T. Jackson

“The past possesses an accumulation of wisdom which we ignore at our peril.”

—Philip Langdon, fromA Better Place To Live

“The city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.”

“In the city, the street must be supreme. It is the first institution of the city. The street is a room by agreement, a community room, the walls of which belong to the donors, dedicated to the city for common use. Its ceiling is the sky.”

—Louis Kahn, from Between Silence and Light

“When we build, let us think we build forever.

Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work that our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone upon stone, that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! This our fathers did for us."

—John Ruskin