Often

It takes a total lack of understanding of people for an architect to design a building that only a few people do not hate. Too often, architects produce structures that suck the soul out of a neighborhood. The darling of architects is the skyscraper. However, skyscrapers do not a livable city make. A city is more than buildings designed to awe. A city that builds to cater to just the powerful and wealthy is seldom a livable city for the many.

A building is a reflection of the culture that designed and built it. Modern buildings are large, bland, overpowering, and sterile, as is the culture of the designers. Euclidean Zoning fragments the urban experience, discourages social interactions between people, enforce common knowledge, and creates sterile environments. Modern architecture and city zoning in the United Stated destroys community and enforce regimentation and separation of social classes. Such designs and urban policies foster social fragmentation, isolation and destroy social cohesion. Urban policies and architectural styles that destroy Third Places and create urban areas that inhibit community, and encourage separation and isolation are created by people in power who fear that which makes urban areas the engines of creativity and innovation, people, and spontaneity.

Le Corbusier as architect and urban planner is the poster child of how design can turn a city into a place people hate. His building have much in common with prisons and German flack towers. Corbusier views of pedestrian cities is made clear in his famous quite, ”We must kill the street!”