August 28, Princeton, N.J

Beneath the veneer of American prosperity lies a profound discontent. Rootlessness, disjuncture and the infinite complexity of modern existence are themes which dominate the tangled matrix of contemporary American culture. The source of this pervasive angst resides invariably within the larger crisis of rationality that has characterized Western thought since the opening of this century. A more immediate and pertinent source however, may be found in the specific configuration of the built environment.

The prolific neutrality and placelessness of the constructed American landscape is the result of the abandonment of space as the principal medium of urban design and town planning. In the course a of a half-century, America has been transformed from an urban and quasi-urban assortment of civic squares, town centers and main streets to the perpetually nomadic kineticsim of suburbia. Place, community and habitable common ground have been sacrificed or virtualized on the altar of Modernity, mobility and a notion of personal independence that can be best described as adolescent.

Civilization is collaborative project. It exists when individuals are liberated from the labors of survival through the rational and collective manipulation of their environment For centuries its' theater has been urban space, a frame for objective reference and collective endeavor that is constructed from the deliberate proximity of individual structures, both public and private, conceptual and physical. Cerebral and material achievement identify the presence of civilization, whose distinction from purely sensory behavior characterize it as a uniquely human enterprise. Knowledge rather than brute strength becomes the definitive aggregate of the power elite.

Nomadic patterns of human existence cannot sustain civilization. The exchange of town and city for suburb has heralded a steady dilution of civilized endeavor in Post-War America. Extraordinary intellectual achievement has indeed occurred, and moments of heroic emancipation have come to pass. However, a candid assessment of our society, whether through an exploration of violent crime, political polarization, or the increasingly destructive sensory addiction of popular culture, must acknowledge its' anemia. To leave the polis to its' own devices is to abandon civilization itself. The disjunction characteristic of the contemporary American psyche is the child of this realization. The Faustian bargain of Post-War planning and the Levittown paradigm, themselves more the product of Centralization than Federalism or Capitalism, has finally revealed its' inadequacies to its' once enthusiastic advocates. The task of today's environmental designer, with the support of local political entities, is to re-introduce urban space, with its' implicit virtues of civility, community and place into the vocabulary of the built environment.