Veritas et Venustas

Veritas et Venustas will be moving from massengale.typepad.com to blog.massengale.com. See you there.

Personal posts about topics like the glories of the New York Yankees will move to jmassengale.tumblr.com or blog.massengale.me: TBD.

blog.massengale.com

Happy New Year

 

Philip Johnson Quote of the Day

Philip [Johnson] was always a perfect gentleman of the old school. But once I saw his wit and grace take an almost grandfatherly form.

It was at the end of a splendid fall day that I had spent with him at New Canaan, reporting an article I was writing for Vanity Fair. My wife and children arrived to pick me up. As he came out of the Glass House to greet them, casting long shadows in the golden, late afternoon sun, my then-four-year-old daughter surveyed the Empyrean scene and its ancient,white, wizard-ish lord.

He welcomed her, and she looked up at him and earnestly asked, "Were you here when the world first started?"

"At last," he replied, taking her two little hands in his, "someone who 'understands' me."

Kurt Andersen

 

My Comment on Chris Gray's "A Landmark Lost and Found" in the New York Times

Click on the photo for a larger view

FROM THE COMMENTS SECTION: Let's look at the photo again. The arch is lipstick on a pig. The station behind it looks like a Los Angeles shopping mall circa 1980–in the heart of one of the world's great cities.

The people in the drawing look like ants. The building behind them has nothing that relates to human scale. It doesn't even look like humans built it: there is no sense it was touched by a human hand, either in the design or the construction.

London is an enormously wealthy city these days. It can't do better than that? (postscript after the jump)

PS: Here's a photo of one of the oldest streets in London. It was a wonderful place to walk until Global Capitalism and its bankers decided they needed new places to roost.

Happy Holidays to all & Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it

VV REDUX: Jung On Traffic Engineers

The psychotherapist Carl Jung wrote about everything, including traffic engineers:

All time-saving methods, to which alleviaton of traffic congestion and other conveniences belong, do not, paradoxically, save any time, but simply fill the time available in such a manner that one has no more time at all. The result of this is inevitable, breathless haste, superficiality and nervous fatigue with all the related symptoms like nervous hunger, impatience, irritability, distractedness etc...

I found this at a public transit blog. Also take a look at their most popular link, P.J. O'Rourke's paean to the car in Give War A Chance ("...even if all these accusations are true, the automobile is still an improvement on its principal alternative, the pedestrian. Pedestrians are easily damaged. Try this test: Hit a pedestrian with a car. Now have the pedestrian hit the car back.... Which is in better shape?").

Children Demanding Play Streets Changed Amsterdam

via Angie Schmitt, "How Children Demanding Play Streets Changed Amsterdam," DC.Streetsblog.org

NICE—but will drones soon be colliding over the streets of Manhattan?